Hello all, new to HE. Switched from wink about 2 months ago. No issues with setup, switched all devices over to HE and things were great to perfect until about 3-5 days ago. I use amazon Alexa voice commands for the majority of my commands and as of recently if I ask Alexa to dim the lights in a room, they will not dim. But here’s the catch, they will not dim ONLY in groups where there is a Philips hue bulb in the group. If there is no hue bulb in the group the lights dim just fine. If I look in the logs I see the command to dim the hue light and that’s it, no other commands given for the other lights. Hue recently updated there software on 6/15 but HE also updated there hub software and I don’t know when amazon last updated there software. So I don’t know if this is a hue issue, HE issue or Alexa issue. Has anyone else noticed this or does anyone have any suggestions? I have rebooted the HE hub. Thanks
The first thing I'd look into is what devices Alexa is trying to control when you tell it to dim your device. The Hue Bridge has a native Alexa integration. Hubitat, of course, also has an Alexa integration. If you're using both I could see a problem with similar device names where Alexa is really trying to manipulate only a Hubitat device that doesn't include that Hue bulb, whereas you really intended to manipulate a Hue light or group with a similar name. I'm not sure there's an easy way to narrow that down besides either watching your Hubitat logs to see if the device you think it's manipulating is indeed the one (still a bit of a guess given that you won't know what caused it) or giving your Hubitat device a guaranteed unique name so you can be sure to invoke only it via voice, at least for the purposes of testing.
A possible issue if you're not using Hue's Alexa integration and are instead using a Hue Bridge Integration app on Hubitat and then exposing those Hubitat (Hue) devices to Alexa via Hubitat's own integration is that Hubitat's Alexa integration excludes Hue devices by default. This would be Hue Bridge bulbs and groups. Here's a screenshot I stole from the docs that illustrates this:
However, if your Hue device is couched in a Hubitat group, I don't think the above setting is that aggressive, and I would assume those devices should still work via that group (which Hubitat's Alexa integration shouldn't even know contains Hue anything). I have not specifically tested this, but I don't think I've seen anyone else mention problems here with those. I suppose you could try disabling the option if you haven't--the only possible harm (which this is on by default to avoid, assuming most people want Hue's native integration) is that you'll accidentally select Hue devices in Hubitat that you already have exposed via Hue and get duplicates in Alexa that way.
So I don’t have the Alexa skill enabled and use the Hubitat hue app for integration. Only one instance of the hue devices show up in the Alexa app. I decided to roll back the HE firmware to see if that would help and it did not, so I’m wondering if this functionality ever worked in HE. I’m going to hide the hue device from the amazon echo and then enable the hue skill and see if that solves the problem. More of a work around but it maybe the only solution.
I noticed the same thing with my setup. I ask Alex to dim "all lights" and she dims only the Hue devices. None of my Inovelli or CE devices dim. If I ask her to dim them separately, without the group, they work just fine.
So I eventually figured it out. Alexa, even without the skill enabled, continues to add my hue bulbs into the app automatically. I know that one of the echo devices has the capability to work as a zigbee hub but I never added the hue devices to the alexa app on purpose. But i wasn't seeing the duplicates because the ones alexa added were lights and the ones that hubitat added were switches (or vice versa). Solution, I removed the hue app from hubitat, then deleted all the hue devices from the alexa app (luckily I only have 5), then reinstalled the hubitat hue app, added the devices from hubitat to alexa, put devices back into there groups and everything worked as it should. BUT after a few days alexa added the hue devices automatically back into the alexa app so that the dups show up again though it hasn't caused an issue, for now. If it causes an issue again I would delete all the devices as I did before, add then via hubitat and turn off automatic discover on the alexa app or just add the devices via the alexa zigbee hub and on the hubitat echo skill make sure the exclude hue devices is enabled. Hope that helps
Just checking if there has been any updates on this or an easier fix? I have the same problem with my dimmable switches not dimming if there are Hue lights in the mix. I can call out the dimmer specifically and it will dim but a statement like "Alexa, set living room lights 10%" will just turn on and dim the Hue lights.
I have a LOT of Hue bulbs and rooms set up so the whole deleting and re-adding and then the possibility of duplicates being listed is something I'd rather not deal with - but will if it's the only way!
