Unsupported devices on Alexa, on Home Assistant

Hi!

I have a pair of Aigosmart LED Wifi bulbs, which apparently are wall gardened in their proprietary app. However, the app allows pairing with Alexa, and they work fine there.

I tried to find a way to integrate Alexa devices into Home Assistant, but what I found is a way to integrate Home Assistant devices to Alexa, which is the opposite of what I want.

Did anyone manage to expose Alexa devices to Home Assistant, similar to what Integrations do?

For reference, I tried the Alexa skill method, the Home Assistant Bridge Alexa skill, and dabbled a bit with Node-Red but I did not delve too much into it.

I would greatly appreciate some guidance or pointers on this. If the question is unclear please do not hesitate to ask.

Amazon doesn’t allow direct integration, but there is a work-around.

You might try an Alexa Routine to control the light plus turn on/off a helper entity in Home Assistant.

I haven’t tried it, but you might look for a WiFi sniffer to see what the data looks like to the light.

Looking at some items on the Aigosmart website suggests these may be using an app created by Tuya. If so, you can try pairing one of the LEDs to the Tuya or Smart Life app, which can integrate into Home Assistant. Worth a shot.

I haven’t tried it with Home Assistant yet but @stevemann is correct about using a routine and possibly a helper. I do with with a GE Sync led strip and my Homeseer instance, having a virtual device in HS control it using routines, which also update the status for me on the HS side.
Would never have bought the strip since it doesn’t offer local control but it was for the low price of free. Can’t turn that down.

That would only work if I have a device hooked up via Home Assistant and it gets exposed to Alexa, right?

The problem I have here is the exact opposite. Alexa-only devices cannot be exposed to Home Assistant.

Mine only connects to google and alexa, pity.

This, along with the routine, look promising, will report back if I manage to hook it up

I have some of these too (don’t ever buy Monoprice Stitch gear, big mistake). Fortunately there’s a workaround, its just kind of ugly. Well actually its REALLY ugly in your case since you have light bulbs, I was fortunate that my dumb devices were just plugs. I’m going to describe below how to get a toggle in HA which turns your light on and off. If you want to be able to set the brightness from HA though, well, that’s going to be quite difficult but I can suggest a bad options.

Unlike google assistant, alexa supports triggering routines from state changes when it believes the device which changed state is a motion or contact sensor. Home Assistant exposes binary sensors of these device classes to Alexa as contact and motion sensors. We can use this since we can make template binary sensors out of whatever we want with whatever device class we want.

So first make two toggle helpers. Let’s call them “Dumb Light On” and “Dumb Light Off”. Yes you need both, more in a second.

Then make two binary sensors like this:

template:
- trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.dumb_light_on
    state: 'on'
  binary_sensor:
    name: Dumb light on
    state: 'on'
    auto_off: '00:00:01'
- trigger:
    platform: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.dumb_light_off
    state: 'off'
  binary_sensor:
    name: Dumb light off
    state: 'on'
    auto_off: '00:00:01'

Expose these binary sensors to Alexa. Then create two routines like so:

WHEN Dumb light on detects motion
THEN Turn on the light

WHEN Dumb light off detects motion
THEN Turn off the light

Now at this point you might be thinking “Why would I need two helpers? I’ll just do this:”

WHEN Dumb light on detects motion
THEN Turn on the light

WHEN Dumb light on does not detect motion
THEN Turn off the light

Don’t do that. It will trigger the second one every time HA restarts or you reload template entities since it reports state off for that entity to alexa. Believe me, it sucks. You need two helpers that immediately turn themselves off when turned on, otherwise you’ll have a bad time.

Now here’s the problem. After all this all you have is a way to turn the light on to 100% brightness from HA. Which is something but not really what you’d expect from a light. What about if you want to set the brightness? Unfortunately there’s no good solution to this. There is a very bad solution though - more toggle helpers.

Basically decide what brightnesses you care about and continue this pattern by making more toggle helpers and binary sensors:

Dumb light to 25% brightness
Dumb light to 50% brightness
Dumb light to 75% brightness
...

Its not going to be fun and it’ll probably annoy you every time you look at it. But it is functional so I suppose that’s something.

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@CentralCommand this is a good idea. Thank you for sharing!
But would it be possible to query or read the state of an Alexa-only device from HA?
I have a large number of rocker switches which are only available to Alexa. I desperately need to get the state changes of these switches into HA as triggers for complex automations beyond what is supported by the simple routine regime in Alexa.
I take it I could add a dummy light bulb which is visible to both Alexa and HA and use it as a semaphore, and just hide the physical bulb in a drawer so that it wouldn’t be seen. But that is not a good option for me as it would require a huge amount of dummy bulbs :roll_eyes:
I was hoping that there somewhere was an Alexa API (even an undocumented one) that could be used?
Maybe you have some other clever idea?

No its not possible. Google and Alexa only allow data to go in, they do not have any way of allowing clients to subscribe for state updates to devices they can see. And there’s no polling API either to ask about the state of devices either.

I highly doubt there ever will be tbh. Besides the fact that Amazon and Google are in the business of collecting data not giving it out, I think they also consider it a security issue. Those rocker switches were set up in alexa as part of one skill, HA is a separate skill. I believe the way they see it is each skill should be managing its devices, telling Alexa their state, and alexa tells them when to change that state. Skills should not be able to access anything about stuff set up by other skills, skill/integration isolation essentially.

Not really honestly. I assume those rockers talk to some other cloud service that integrates with Alexa? If anything its more likely that particular cloud service has undocumented APIs. I’d google around to see if anyone has cracked the app you use to manage them and made a custom integration for it for HA. Or if not perhaps you can try to track the API calls whatever app you use is making and reverse engineer it.

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Thank you. You are 100% right. These rocker comes from a closed source cloud integration made by Eaton Inc. Regretfully, the only HA integration that exists, is a reversed version without support for rockers. And I am not a programmer myself.
I was thinking though, maybe it is possible to capture the voice output from Alexa and feed it into a voice-to-text app. After all, voice is a form of output, right?