What's it used for?
I Was just trying to create a new virtual device and saw this in the list. It doesn't seem to be able to do much of anything.
I'm looking for a way to set various location modes and expose that to alexa without having to create a virtual switch or something for each mode. I thought "mode device" might help but I can't figure out what its supposed to do. Thx.
That is a device type that is used for Hub Link. It has no other purpose and can't be used for anything else.
For Alexa to set the mode, you would need something like a virtual switch, and would have to say something like "Alexa, turn on Day Mode", or what ever you called the switch. It might be better to figure out how to have modes set automatically. Check out Mode Manager.
Yeah I generally do automatic modes, but there are one or two cases where I want the ability to switch via alexa.
Is there a switch type that alexa understands that can take a parameter? Something like:
alexa, set MySwitch to "mode"?
This way I only have to create 1 switch, rather than 1 per mode.
You could use a virtual RGBW light, and use colors. "Alexa, set ModeLight to Blue"
@bill And, if you added an Alexa Routine with phrase "Mode Night", you could say "Alexa, Mode Night" and have that Alexa Routine set the virtual RGBW light = 'Blue".
That would allow more natural speech.ogiewon@gmail.com You still have to add some Hubitat logic to convert Blue into a Mode change to Night.
That's a cool idea. I'm going to implement that tomorrow.
I like the suggestions above, and will definietly help me with the Alexa side of things.
Can you then assign buttons to this, i.e. for the Dashboard or to use in SharpTools?
I definitely needed a 'Party' mode in my last Fibaro setup, which would be quite difficult to automate 
I really like this idea of overloading/mis-using a virtual switch for other purposes.
I have a wakeup piston in WebCoRE that I wanted to be able to set the night before from Alexa. The problem with this is that my wakeup routine does several things BEFORE the actual wakeup time, so triggering it off of an alexa alarm doesn't really work, unless I want an alexa alarm going off an hour before I actually want to get up. Instead I trigger it off a global webcore var where I set the wakeup time and then a variety of actions happen at T-minus that time. I just needed a way to set that global time var with alexa.
What I ended up doing is using a virtual dimmer in concert with alexa routines as outlined above. In Alexa I have routines defined as:
Set Wakeup to 7 o'clock
Set Wakeup to 7 fifteen
Set Wakeup to 7 thirty
Etc. Each of these routines sets my virtual dimmer to a particular setting:
7=7am
71=7:15
72= 7:30
73=7:45
Then on the WebCoRE side i have a big case statement that runs every day in the early am, which transposes the virtual switch setting to set the correct @global time var value.
Voila! I can now set my wakeup routine to go off at any quarter hour interval between 5-11am.
I'm trying to do something like this. The idea of setting up different routines by name is a good workaround, but not ideal.
Has anything changed with Alexa or Hubitat since this post that would allow a command to Alexa to pass a time variable to Hubitat? The ideal would be if the Alexa command to set an alarm could be interpreted by Hubitat to obtain the alarm time and use it for various actions.
The only way to do this right now is via IFTTT with this Rube Goldberg setup:
Unfortunately, Alexa alarms going off cannot be used directly as triggers in Alexa routines.
This is not possible with Hubitat. There is a way to do it using Node-RED that works mediocrely at best.
Ah, I figured as much.
I will clarify, to me, the ideal is not to use the alarm going off as the trigger, but SETTING the alarm to be something that would pass the time set to Hubitat.
Is there possibly any sort of custom Alexa skill that can pass a time to Hubitat? "Hey Alexa, set the Plubmus to 7:00AM." With that command just passing the time "7:00AM" to Hubitat.
Not to my knowledge.
Download the Hubitat app
