Title pretty much says it. Up until now everything in my house has been controlled with alexa on a slew of echo devices and through the alexa app. I am starting to set things up in home assistant but have come to the realization that a few of my bulbs do not work well with home assistant.
I would like to move towards Zigbee based bulbs instead of Wifi, and want a Zigbee hub device that works out of the box with alexa just like my other bulbs and switches do, and presents connected devices to alexa easily, but can also be linked to home assistant, another requirement is that it function offline, so that if i lost internet connection, home assistant can still send commands to them through the bridge. the alexa requirement makes ZHA not an option, as my reading suggests it will not work as nicely with alexa, and you canât have two coordinators in a zigbee network, so ZHA + another hub isnât an option.
anyone have a smart home hub that they love and use with alexa?
Where do you get your information. The Alexa integration doesnât care whether you are using ZHA or Zigbee2mqtt or whatever. It presents what Homeassistant sees to Alexa. As long as you setup the Alexa integration correctly it works fine.
I ask because everything else you ask is satisfied easily with a Zigbee stick using ZHA or Zigbee2mqtt on a local install of HA.
Unless I am misunderstanding, alexa integration in home assistant requires creating a skill in the alexa developer console, and gluing everything together with AWS lambda functions which is a whole lot more work than plugging in a new light bulb and alexa picking it up immediately after it is paired.
I do not want devices that are already paired with alexa to show up twice. I want to continue using the first party skills with alexa. it already works, and my Wife and i are comfortable controlling everything in the home we need with alexa, while I play around with home assistant.
You are misunderstanding. For the basic alexa skill itâs recommended to use the Home Assistant Cloud, and I personally recommend paying the 5 bucks a month for Nabu Casa. It will give you control of all of your HomeAssistant devices IN Alexa (This part is very important - itâs one-way)
If youâre trying to control devices that exist IN Alexa from ANYWHERE ELSE (Home Assistant, SmartThings, Vera, Hubitat - any) it requires code gymnastics because Alexa considers their ecosystem one way. If you looked up how to control Alexa stuff FROM HA then yes it does require Lambda code - as does every other system out there.
This is important because you have three ways to skin this.
(My reccommendation) Zwave and/or Zigbee controller on HomeAssistant Instance. Connect that Instance to Alexa. You will be able to control all the HA devices in Alexa and even trigger scenes and automations You can either roll your own exposure to the cloud for oyur HA instance or again pay the 5 bucks a month and do Nabu Casa (Note thereâs a console to filter which devices you even expose to Alexa in the first place to prevent duplicates)
Use an intermediary system such as SmartThings or Hubitat to host the Zwave / Zigbee and then connect that system to BOTH HA and Alexa. This would remove the benefit of local automation in the case of Smartthings (itâs a cloud to cloud integration) at worst and introduce unnecessary âhopsâ between systems for very little benetfit (at best) with Hubitat. It also complicates the setup.
Go Zigbee ONLY and use Alexa Zigbee capable devices such as the large Echo Shows and the Echo Plus lines (and some others) and just use Alexa to host your voice AND devices (what Amazon would want you to do, and why the walled gardenm I mention above.)
For Alexa control, Youâre thinking of Haska way, which is extremely complicated. Hereâs how to set that up.
As pointed out by @NathanCu and the video, Nabu Casa is only $5 a month and is the simplest option.
There is a âthird wayâ I use. Itâs simpler then Haska, but not as easy as Nabu Casa. It uses a node red palette and associated Alexa skill. Its free and you have total control on what devices show up in Alexa this way. I posted about it here if interested
Sorry to resurrect and old post, but Iâm trying to figure out how to do this. Willing to do some code gymnastics to make it happen. Any pointers in the rough, right-ish direction?
I have some mini splits with Alexa-only integration, and I really, really want to pull them into HA. Theyâre perfectly functional in the Alexa app, but I use HA for nearly everything, and would prefer to keep our automations, etc., in HA.
