Alexa won't change volume of my Monoprice 6-zone amp zones

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1

I've recently moved my Monoprice 6-Zone Amp integration over from SmartThings.

It's working well, except that the zone devices show up in Alexa as simple switches. SmartThings exposed them to Alexa as what I think are dimmers, which allowed for voice control of volume.

Is there a setting in the driver or the Alexa integration that I missed?

2

This appears to be an Alexa limitation, in that it doesn't recognize component audio devices. The generic component audio device is a switch device (on/off) that uses setVolume to change the volume (as opposed to setLevel like a dimmer).

The simplest solution would be:

  1. Do not expose the component audio devices to Alexa.
  2. Create six virtual dimmers corresponding to each component audio device that you expose to Alexa. Give these dimmers names that correspond to your six component audio devices.
  3. Setup six simple rules (one for each virtual dimmer / component audio pair) that use as trigger dimmer value. And as action, save the dimmer value to a numeric variable, then use that variable to setVolume() on the relevant component audio device.

This is a one-time setup that will take a little time (making/naming six virtual dimmers, creating 6 simple rules). But it will resolve the issue.

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3

@aaiyar, thanks for your response.

I don't agree. As I mentioned, SmartThings' Alexa integration exposes the zones as something with a percentage slider -- my guess is a dimmer. Unfortunately, I deleted the zone devices from SmartThings -- which deleted them from Alexa -- and now I can't recreate them to check if they were created in Alexa as dimmers or something else with a percentage slider. So, not an Alexa limitation, but perhaps a limitation in how the Hubitat Alexa integration is written. One that could perhaps be corrected.

Thanks for the detailed workaround. I'll try it. Granted it may only require one time setup, but any extra virtual devices and rules means more unnecessary complexity to maintain, compared to my assumption of what is a simple modification to the Alexa integration.

4

It is an Alexa limitation not to recognize an audio device. Speakers are not dimmers, are they? :grinning:

One of the problems with their being exposed as dimmers is using an Alexa command such as "Dim all the lights to 10%". Or "Set lights to 100%". Those commands would also apply to speakers.

The real solution would be for Alexa to recognize audio devices. Because even the workaround I suggested remains subject to this caveat.

5

Yes.

Agreed.

You might be on to somethingthere. This has never been a problem for me, which leads me to believe that they aren't exactly exposed as light dimmers with SmartThings.

Agreed, but getting Amazon to make a change is more difficult than achieving a solution in Hubitat similar to that in ST.

6

Can you find out the device type?

The only device type that supports levels that I’m aware of is a light dimmer, so it would be useful to know if there’s another.

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Sadly, I can no longer do it on my system. I deleted the devices in SmartThings and therefore in Alexa. I can no longer recreate them because they the driver was Groovy-based and recently stopped being running due to the switch over to Edge drivers.

I could ask another user to check it out, but they may have deleted things as I have. Will let you know.

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8

Was it this one?

https://github.com/poelock/smartthings/blob/master/devicetypes/poelock/monoprice.src/monoprice.groovy

If so, it makes it appear as a dimmer (SwitchLevel capability). I don't think Hubitat will implement that in a built-in driver for an audio device.

You should be able to port the SmartThings DTH and use it as a Hubitat driver. And from my brief perusal of the DTH code, it should not be very hard to port.

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9

It was this one. Looks like it uses SwitchLevel capability, too.

I appreciate the suggestion. Reasons I probably won't:

  • I'm hoping that running this amplifier through Hubitat is only temporary until somebody releases a SmartThings Edge driver for it
  • I invested the time to follow your advice to create the virtual devices and rules. Working as desired and it was a good opportunity to investigate Rule Machine.
  • My preference is to prevail upon the platform developers to modify an official driver -- if I have a reasonable case and it's a minor change -- before forking into a custom driver
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10

You could certainly submit a feature request. No harm in requesting it.

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