Hi all.
My dishwasher is connected to a smart plug and when my solar is generating enough power, it switches on the plug and the dishwasher starts. I want all my alexas in the house to announce after an hour ‘the dishwasher is finished’, so that my kids hear it and have no excuse for not emptying it when I am out at work.
I have my entities ‘exposed’ to alexa in HA but I cannot see how I can achieve this. I would’ve hoped that I could integrate all my echoes into HA but I cannot see if that is possible.
Any help appreciated.
I assume this means you have a Nabu Casa subscription. The problem is that although this allows you to turn things on and off with voice commands, it mostly doesn’t work the other way round - you can’t trigger Alexa by switching things on and off.
Fortunately there are a couple of exceptions - Alexa will recognise an input_boolean as a trigger for one of its routines; it will also recognise a template binary sensor, provided it has the device_class “door”. Both appear to Alexa as contact sensors, so they will be either “open” (on) or “closed” (off).
To encourage your kids, you could start a HA timer when the dishwasher starts. When the timer finishes (after an hour), turn an input_boolen on. In Alexa, use the input_boolean to trigger a routine making the announcement.