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.
