Hello,
Question concerning using Alexa for my Hue bulbs. I have a Hue Bridge connected to Hubitat via the Hue Bridge Integration. I added the Hubitat Elevation skill to Alexa and shared the Hue bulbs but Alexa could no discover the bulbs. I tried several times without success. On the last attempt I connected Alexa via the Hue bridge which worked (devices discovered). My question is this a proper way of getting the bulbs to show up in Alexa? I assumed the bulbs would be discoverable via the HE connection but as mentioned I could not get that to work. Thanks for any input you can provide.
Have you added the devices you want to control with Alexa to the Echo Skill app in HE? At the bottom of the add devices page, there is a switch to exclude Hue integrated bulbs. You really need to decide which skill will control the Hue bulbs. If you want everything to go through HE, then you need to remove the Hue skill from Alexa and make sure the Exclude switch is off.
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Hello, yes I added them to the Echo Skill App. Right now I plan on controlling as much as possible in Hubitat, Alexa is for random voice control. However, one of my routines/rules is based on motion from a Ring camera which I believe requires me to build that rule in Alexa. But I think I do see the issue based on your comment. The switch is on to exclude Hubitat integrated Hue devices. I read that as devices added to Hubitat directly and not via the Hue integration. It sounds like I need to turn that switch off and Alexa can discover them. Means I have to remove the bulbs from Alexa and start over.
I have my Hue bulbs controlled by the Hue skill rather than HE. Since I have the Hue integration I can have rules to control the bulbs as well. I can have a rule with more than one Hue bulb that responds to an HE Alexa skill. You aren't necessarily limited whichever way you go.
The problem with linking them with the Hue Skill is that any changes made by Alexa will be outside of HE and therefore will only update after the polling period by the Hue integration in HE. So, HE won't match whats really going on at the moment.
I don't use Alexa so I can't speak to what might be going on and why they won't sink from HE but if you open a live logging window after you add the devices to Alexa it should show you if any were not synced because they are not supported. I know the Google Home integration does.
That is something to be aware of. You also have the same issue controlling things from the Hue app. I haven't really found it to be a problem. Most of my lights are controlled by automations and Alexa only gets to override something. I think the polling interval is 1 minute so the dashboards do update, but I don't use those much either.
And having a poll rate that high can definitely help if you do control from hue. I have 100% control within HE so I was able to bump the poll rate up from 10 seconds to 1 minute and have seen better hub performance during high load times.
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I really hadn't thought about it much. I had them this way with HomeAssistant and just left them when I moved to HE. It might be worth moving them to the HE Alexa Skill. Thanks for pointing it out. Something to do for tomorrow.
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I have a HE dedicated to cloud services, and use the Alexa skill on this hub. I quit using the Hue Alexa skill and run it all through my HE for the cloud. I swear that I saw an improvement in speed from everything, even the Hue hubs. My thinking was to eliminate load on my essential hubs and offload the cloud connections to the HE hub dedicated to that purpose. I had been having some lag in the Hue hubs, and thought that maybe the constant updates to HE and Alexa might have been slowing them down, seems to have fixed them.
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So I began my migration. I think, had I been using dashboards it might have been quite an annoyance waiting for the state to sync between Hue and HE. A really simple task and it can be done one at a time, so I can do a few when I have time. Thanks.
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I removed the connection of the Hue bridge to Alexa now have the Hue bridge connected to HE and HE connected to Alexa. I was able to turn the Hue floodlights on when motion on the Ring camera was detected. I also built my first rule in HE to turn on a Hue light at a specific time. So on my way to begin setting up the rules/routines in HE instead of Alexa only. Thanks to everyone for your input.
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