I'm curious if the current Alexa arrangement is considered final or if further refinements are expected. I'm slowly transitioning from ST over to the light side and loving damn near everything so far but this Alexa arrangement, which my household uses likely as the primary means of lighting control, is not working out and in light of my appreciation of the rest of the HE world, that comes as a shock to me.
The warning that alexa won't work with device types and capabilities that used to work perfectly on ST was a sour note from the start. Now I've got the skill setup and everything I tried for the first few days worked great. Today my gf tells me that "left" one of our RBGW nighttable bulbs works for on and off but not setLevel. I come home and try it with Right, the same bulb 7 feet away. "Right doesn't support that" (it did last night?!), I try "Alexa, turn on Right" This time "Couldn't find a device named Right in Stefan's profile" (you did 5 seconds ago?!)... Restart the hub (through the settings menu) - Alexa, Set Left to 20 -- "Couldn't find a device named Left in Stefan's profile" (you could 5 minutes ago?)
Everything worked fine yesterday. I added some new devices today (zigbee outlets and dimmers) and opened the settings menu for the alexa skill to enable them with alexa, that's the only thing that changed. Now both bulbs alternate between barely working and not existing in the alexa-universe at all.
Alexa is being actively refined, but sometimes progress is slow. Did you go into the app and forget everything and readd it under hubitat? Might help a bit, but some integrations haven't been added yet.
In other threads here, it's apparent that the zigbee radio is not as strong in HE as in Smartthings. So, that being said, have you checked your routing tables to see what may be hindering communication? Bulbs are not great repeaters. There is a great write up in documentation about building a strong zigbee mesh. it would be worth checking. About two or three weeks ago, I got my @ss handed to me with zigbee problems. Turned out to be a few things, but the routing is dynamic and would explain why things work sometimes. Things are always trying to find the best route to the hub. So adding a repeater or two might benefit your setup. But, I'm not sure how much or what you have in your setup, so it could just mean changing placement.
On another note, maybe it's time to rethink your automations, or jump out of the box? What if your house interacted with you? What if you didn't have to consciously call for a light or press a button to make something happen? That's my idea of a smart home. Just telling it to do something feels .. well, kinda lazy, but not totally lazy. BE LAZY. Smartthings gave you something to start with. Now, make it better. You're already there by bringing your control to a local level. By doing that, you got "Blazing Fast". Now make your guests wonder "how the hell is this happening?" It's an awesome thing. My vision of a smart home is for it to just know what to do. NOT tell it what to do. It requires thought and planning, but in the it's so worth it. Alexa might not be all that yet. But there are a lot of things that are. Mostly because of the community. While you wait for the Alexa integration to improve, maybe we can help you to find some workarounds?
I have switched about 9 zigbee devices to my HE mesh, I'm going to wager it's not a mesh or interference situation for two reasons 1) the two bulbs are about 6 feet away from the HE hub, and excluding a thin fabric lamp-shade actually have an open line of sight to the hub, and 2) I would think my google assistant would also have trouble communicating with the bulbs if it was a mesh problem. In the chain of Alexa -- HE Hub -- Device, mesh issues would be in the second gap, and would effect more than one trigger, and I think symptoms suggest the problem is in the first gap area.
I think frankly it's just not integrated with amazons service in the same way as other bigger services are. I'm not sure how amazon's api works but I have a hunch they've offered some better means of integration to ST than they have to us. I've got a million workarounds to alexa, buttons, google assistant, wall switches for all but 3 bulbs in the apartment, customized arduino buttons, and access to at least 3 dashboard options lol Nonetheless, girlfriend essentially defaults to alexa for 90% of her interactions with the system, as we have an echo dot in every room, so for the approval factor, getting texts at work that the dumb robots forgot we have "left" and "right" is not looking good when it all worked great a week ago on ST.
Now I'm back to on and off working fine and "set left/right to ##" resulting in "I couldn't find a device or group named left/right in Stefan's profile." Both worked fine earlier with level-setting, and I didn't change any device drivers or anything since -- earlier even on and off didn't work. idk what is going on with this integration.
By chance, does your gf have an account on your Alexa also? I have issues with Alexa in that a device is not found when in wife's account so i switch to mine and there it is. For whatever reason, found devices on Alexa aren't discovered across multiple accounts. It's frustrating! I have same issue with Routines I created. We have to make sure to be in my account when calling Routines. Not good for WAF but not a HE problem.
Thanks for your message. No second account at play here though, she uses my Amazon account for everything.
I'm thinking about telling her to forget all devices and try readding just what is on HE, there's still a lot of ST devices on there, and a lot of devices that are marked as unresponsive (many of which were marked unresponsive when everything was still on st without a problem). Nervous to try this as I stumbled on a thread yesterday where someone couldn't readd anything after trying this, but maybe a fresh start would help.
Just go into the Alexa app in HE and deselect all of your devices but don't delete the app. Then on the ST side delete or disable the Alexa integration there if you don't use it any longer then on the Alexa app on your phone delete all of the devices the Hubitat devices will likely all have disapeared automatically but the ST ones probobly won't have. Then you should just be able to go back into apps on Hubitat and add devices back into Alexa there and they should become available very quickly.
