The Haaska Super Thread

Third party integrations
1

Hey there! I didn’t realize there was a Haaska tag until just now.

To help reduce some clutter in our GitHub project, I’ve decided to create this thread for general talk/questions/help.

I’ll try to help as much as I can, but please remember that I am only one of the two people on the project, and I am also limited by how much I can do in my free time.

What is Haaska?
The Home Assistant Alexa Skill Adapter, or “haaska”, implements a bridge between a Home Assistant instance and the Smart Home Skill API for Amazon’s Alexa. It provides voice control for a connected home managed by Home Assistant, through any Alexa-enabled device.

How do I set up Haaska?
The latest version, with instructions, can be found on GitHub at mike-grant/haaska.

Edit 2019-02-18: Revised instructions are almost complete! Just need to finish the “Using” and “Troubleshooting” sections.

Why can’t I control “_____” with Haaska?
Haaska is just the adapter that connects Home Assistant to Alexa. What devices are available and how they appear depends on code in HA’s Smart Home API, and Amazon’s restrictions. Not every feature is available through Alexa, though there are some workarounds.

I’ve got a question that isn’t answered here…
Go ahead, ask away! If you want to, you can also make a new post in the Haaska tag:
HA Community - Third Party Integrations - haaska

14 Likes
2

One question about haaska and alexa. My wife (who is a part of the alexa household), can’t seem to be able to install the haaska skill I created and I can see. How would I open it up so she can see/use it?

3

You should need to install anything other than to your Alexa/Amazon account. You don’t need to install it for your wife/to a phone or anything. it ties into the smart home Alexa api and HASS API so just say "Alexa turn on ____ (kitchen, family room, etc) and it’ll work.

1 Like
4

I agree with @phantomdarkness here, once activated on the Echo, it should just “work”. There isn’t really a need to set it up for each person. It would be the same as having any other Smart Home Skill (Wink, Nest, Ecobee, etc.) set up.

5

That’s great to know! Last step is to get it integrated into my Node-Red automation. Then I can completely replace having to create accounts in another skill to use Alexa.

6

As I responded in the GitHub issue, I’ve never used Node-RED myself so I’m not sure how these things would talk together. Haaska is pretty much only written to understand what Home Assistant gives it.

7

I can’t seem to understand the make file option. I downloaded the zip file from the hub. Unzip and rename config.json.sample to config.json. Make the necessary changes to config.json and now I’m stuck with the make file. How do I do this in windows ? Even the tutorial assumes you have a phyton installed which I did install in windows but there is no make command. The tutorial just mention make file without explaining what it is and how to do it in windows.

No one seems to elaborate more on this for windows users. Went through some bruh youtube channel on getting the zip file but the tutorial seems outdated and only work on the older home assistant setup where you can log in to pi.

Can anyone explain how to do this for hassio?

8

Make is just a generic python thing, Google it without Home Assistant and you should find plenty of help. I don’t have a clue with this sort of thing and had no problems finding the answer to create the file on my Mac.

9

Hi @twctg81 - though I haven’t finished the updated instructions yet, you can use our new pre-built version. That way, you avoid having to set up Python and Make (sometimes called a compiler/build system).

Download this:

(Use the one that says haaska.zip.)

Here’s what you can do:

  • download the file
  • unzip it
  • edit the config.json
  • zip it again

Then it will be ready to upload to Lambda.

You can follow a bunch of the steps from the Wanderer’s blog, which talks about he set it up with Hass.io. Just skip the parts with make.

2 Likes
10

Thanks for that Zip, was getting a weird make issue where it would corrupt the zip file. This bypassed all those issues!

1 Like
11

Nice, that’s going to help a lot of people with limited python skills.

As an aside, I set mine up not long after v3 first came out, and it’s still working perfectly thank you, but are there any advantages to updating to the current version?

12

@Bobby_Nobble - The latest release supports using long lived tokens, so you can remove the legacy auth API password.

Not any other big changes to make, because all the interesting stuff happens on the Home Assistant side.

There are some minor tweaks still planned, like handling the URL better if someone puts it in slightly wrong, etc. Here’s an example:
https://github.com/mike-grant/haaska/issues/75

1 Like
13

Thanks, if I wanted tp update I’d just go back in and reupload the zip or is there more to it?

14

I’ve been putting this off for a while, but thanks to the precompiled make/zip file, and the simple instructions, I was able to get this up and running in about an hour. Would have been faster, but I made a few small mistakes along the way. Biggest pain was that I was using the HA cloud service for alexa, and adding this and discovering devices added so 200+ devices. Which makes sense. Ended up deleting everything from my alexa account, then filtering what I wanted to add, and then setting back up alexa groups/rooms how I had it set up before. That took another hour or so, but… it works great.

1 Like
15

@Bobby_Nobble - Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Make sure you edit the config file, and just upload the zip again. It’s that easy :slight_smile:

2 Likes
16

@anthonylavado first of all many thanks for building/improving this package and sharing it.
could you perhaps explain or point me in the direction where I can read about the difference/benefit of Haaska over emulated_hue?
thank you

17

Emulated hue is easier to set up but exposes everything as a light. So things like locks you’d need to say “Alexa, turn on Front Door” or something like that to unlock. Which doesn’t make any sense. It’s also limited to ~50 devices IIRC.

HAASKA/Home Assistant Cloud is far superior (though a tad more complicated to set up). Things get exposed correctly (lights as lights, locks as locks, etc). And you can expose scripts as well. It’s much better imo.

2 Likes
18

I agree that Haaska is much better than emulated_hue. I used it for a long time until I updated to using the HA cloud.

One of the reasons I went to the HA cloud (aside from supporting HA development) is that my understanding was that I needed to open a port on my router to get haaska to work. Is my understanding on that correct?

I had the port open but decided the less open ports the better so i went to the HA cloud.

19

That’s correct, you’d need to open a port. But maybe I’m wrong but you’d need to open a port anyway to have your instance accessible to the outside world anyway? IDK, I’ve never messed with the HA Cloud but I’d think your HASS instance needs to be accessible for either option to work.

1 Like
20

Yeah, you’d have to have a port open. I don’t worry about that as I already have that port open for outside access to HA, but I have everything set up properly so it shouldn’t be an issue.

One thing I like about Haaska is my thermostat is accessible and setable via Alexa. My tstat doesn’t have an Alexa app, but works with HA. Hur obviously wouldn’t do this and when using the cloud, while I could set stuff with Alexa, she’d throw an error everytime despite it working. She also couldn’t tell me what the temp was set at so that’s a nice improvement.