First off, sorry but I am totally 100% green to this so excuse the basic nature of this question.
I just got my hubitat today, and am wanting to get things up and running with my z-wave and various other devices.
My main question is regarding Alexa. I want to be able to call out things to Alexa to control, such as my philips hue bulbs and such, but of course I want these devices to also be setup through my Hubitat.
My question is - what is the order of events to installing, for example, philips hue bulbs, into the hubitat, to then also be controlled via voice command through Alexa? What is the best way to do this to ensure it's setup properly?
I am tackling all of this from scratch and want to install things correctly so I don't have a tangled mess in the future.
pair devices to hubitat. then in the alexa skills, link to hubitat. then in your hub, install the respective alexa app, and select the devices you want to be sent to your alexa
Since hue has its own Alexa skill, I would suggest adding your Hue devices directly to Alexa so you can control them by voice without including Hubitat in the middle. It isn’t necessary, and while it’s unlikely to impact reliability, that’s possible, so why bother if there’s no upside.
Then you can also use the hub’s built-in integration with Hue to get your Hue devices to show up within the Hubitat interface and use them for all your other non-voice command needs.
If you use Alexa to turn on/off a hue bulb, the bulb’s updated status will be pushed to Hubitat. And vice versa if you use Hubitat to turn the bulb on/off.
You might find the relevant pages of the hub documentation to be helpful if you haven’t read them yet.
it depends on the integration. WeMo has direct integration with Alexa and I have random issues with Alexa/WeMo, but not if I control the WeMo through my HE
Yes I suppose if another device’s Alexa integration is not very reliable, that would be a reason to use Hubitat as a man in the middle .
I don’t use Hue devices, but I would guess their Alexa integration works well. Lutron’s Alexa skill for Caseta works just fine, so I integrate with Alexa directly (and use Hubitat for all non-voice related stuff that involves my Caseta devices).
Got it....thanks guys. I think you are right. I will configure Hue to Alexa directly, then add it into my hubitat just so I can have control if I need it. I wasn't sure if the status of the bulb would go to Hubitat if I did it that way, so I'm glad to know that it will work seamlessly!
There is a specific option in Hubitat you might want to play with regarding Hue. I am not sure what would be best for your situation, but they did include that for a reason. Likely it will be better with this on?
While I'd still recommend doing it the way suggested above (Hue set up via the Bridge, then integrate the Bridge to both Alexa and Hubitat without putting Hubitat in the middle), there is something worth noting here: the Hue API doesn't provide a way to "push" bulb or room/zone (group) changes to third-party integrations. The third-party has to fetch the new/current states from the Bridge periodically. So, if you change a bulb from Alexa, Hubitat will indeed take a bit of time to see it. This could be a few seconds up to a minute (or more if your "polling interval" is set higher in the Hue integration app on Hubitat; the default is one minute)--just however long it takes from the change you made outside of Hubitat until Hubitat's next poll.
I think that prevents the duplication of devices if you have integration with both alexa and hue. If you have it turned off and are not careful when configuring which devices get presented to Alexa by HE, you may end up with duplicates on the Alexa side...
I don't have hue, so can't confirm, but I know for all my other devices, I can select the ones I send to Alexa. If you pair hue, does it just send over everything?
.
