Hi all, I'm using the cocohue app and have hue groups (built in hue) that i've pulled into hubitat groups along with other various switches, non-hue bulbs. etc.
I have 2 master device groups (inside house and outside house) that i pushed to alexa from hubitat which should cover everything.
however when i use voice, often several lights don't turn off around the house. when i look at the lamps, etc. that don't go off its almost always 'white hue' bulbs that don't get picked up. i can call the subgroup directly (kitchen, office, etc.) and it will then turn off. when i look up the events for the specific bulb/device there is not one which i would expect since it didn't go off.
so my question is related to the best strategy to group lights so voice control is more successful. does anyone know the weak link in my setup?
i've been very careful to always 'uncheck' the box in apps where it says unchecking this will make the lights more likely to get picked up
should I leave the hue groups out and build the group in alexa using the hue skill instead? (dont really want to do this because i want hubitat to be the primary controller for everything)
should i put the individual hue bulbs into hubitat groups one at a time instead of using the hue groups?
what are other people doing here? is there maybe a way to create a rule that follows behind the 'turn inside house off' looking for any lights that got missed and turn them off?
is this an issue because i have 50+ bulbs in hue and over 150 devices total?
White only or the Wnite Ambiance (shades of white) bulbs? And to be clear, these are CoCoHue bulbs (not Hue groups with either Hubitat or CoCoHue's integration or Hubitat-native groups), right? If so, I'm wondering about a few things:
Leave Alexa out of the picture for a second. All it should do is send an "Off" command, the same as you could do if you went to the device page and just did this yourself. If you try that, does it work? If not, do you see any errors in the logs?
Are the bulbs using the correct driver? For a White bulb, this would be "CoCoHue Dimmable Bulb." For a White Ambiance bulb, this would be "CoCoHue CT Bulb" (assuming CoCoHue and not the native integration). White and Color bulbs are "CoCoHue RGBW Bulb" (as are color-only devices like the first-gen Hue Lightstrip, in which case the note below about manually setting a fake color temperature might be necessary).
Does Alexa really have the right device? This is hard to tell sometimes, but it's possible Alexa is confused if you used the native Hue integration previously, switched to Hubitat's Alexa skill, and the "old" devices weren't removed from Alexa (most modern skills/integrations are pretty good about cleaning up like this, but it's still worth checking). You could try manually turning off from the Alexa app instead of using voice and making sure that it's using a device from Hubitat and not Hue (it can tell you what integration the device is coming from). If #1 above works but this doesn't, this possibility seems pretty likely.
With Google Assistant, I've seen groups containing White Ambiance bulbs not want to get added if the group device isn't fully populated with all color and color temperature information (the former is not likely to happen with white-only bulbs of any kind, and neither very likely with all-whtie bulbs). Manually doing a Set Color and a Set Color Temperature on the device page was the solution here (v2.0 solves this by initializing with sensible defaults). I haven't seen this problem on Alexa or with individual lights themselves, but I suppose it could also be worth trying. If the devices are using the correct driver, however, this shouldn't matter (groups are a bit different since they expose all capabilities regardless of "member devices").
That was my assumption. I realize I forgot to address these questions:
My opinion is "no" for all the questions, especially the first two (the last one might be debateable; Hue only officially supports up to 50 devices per Bridge, but with multiple Bridges and Hubitat, you can overcome that, and I think it stops letting you add more devices when you reach that limit, which is more about Bridge resources than a hard device number; some people have hundreds of devices on Hubitat without issue). Hue groups will give you better performance than Hubitat groups with Hue bulbs since a command to a Hue group is just one command each between Hubitat and Hue and then Hue and the bulbs; a Hubitat group would have an individual command for each bulb, which might at least be noticeable ("popcorn effect" where bulbs turn off one after the other) or cause problems (Hue doesn't recommend sending more than 10 bulb commands per second).
This part I think makes sense. The only thing I can think of with this is that you'll probably want to disable on/off optimization, though I'm not sure that would account for your problem (a CoCoHue group is considered "on" if at least one bulb is on, so turning off shouldn't be a problem from Hubitat since it will send the "off" command anyway; it could cause problems in the other direction, turning on, if you want the entire group to turn on; Hubitat Hue groups are "on" only if all bulbs are on, so could definitely cause problems with an "off" to the group).
For these, I'd just make sure that the individual bulbs are using the correct driver ("CoCoHue Dimmable Bulb"). The CoCoHue group would just be the "CoCoHue Group" driver (no other options there), and for the sake of completeness, I'd probably just make sure it has all color and color-temperature-related attributes set (just doing a "Set Color Temperature" and "Set Color" to any valid values should work) in case Alexa cares, though I'm not sure it does. The goal here is to make sure that under "Current States," you see "hue," "saturation," and "color temperature" set ("level" also matters but should be good already, as should "switch").
If all that seems right, my advice would be to make sure that "On" and "Off" works on the group device in Hubitat. If that does, I'm not sure why Alexa would be failing, but knowing this would at least allow you to pinpoint where the problem lies. Hope this helps a bit!
thank you! i think most of what you said i'm doing but this gives me some things to go over and some of this info is new to me. the bulbs are showing the cocohue driver so i think that is ok. i did set up the hue hub in the beginning w/ the default integration then the forum pointed me to cocohue so i deleted it and started over.
i've also noticed one hue bulb in the morning that comes on at 7am will blink on and off at least 10x between 7am and 730am. i find zero evidence of this in either the event log or anywhere else so that may be a hardware issue but its interesting that it stops after that time and acts normally the rest of the day.
