Alexa replies "Device not found" to items which are UNDEF or NULL and have the tag "autoupdate=false"

ModuloFS · September 22, 2019, 10:10am

Hello,

i have some simple 433 MHz RF switches which i only can control and not read back the current state. Because of this my item definition contains “autoupdate=false”, so the switchstate stays undefined or null and acts only as an ON and OFF button without a current state in my Basic UI.
I control this switches with my alexa as well. Since a few weeks i got a problem with this setup. If alexa controls the switch, it return the sentence: “-Gerätename- antwortet nicht, bitte prüfe die Netzwerkverbindung und Stromversorgung des Geräts”, in English: “-Devicename- do not answer, please check the network and mains connection”. The switching command is executed correctly by alexa.
I am using openHAB 2.4

My question is now, is this behavior normal since a certain update or some such?

jeshab · September 24, 2019, 9:58pm

This is by design with the Alexa Skill v3, which was rolled out mi-August, as it now tracks the state of specific capabilities. Although, based on your description, Alexa should reply “Device not responding” for anything based with a device state opposed to “Device not found”. You can refer to the troubleshooting documentation.

Anyway, there is an enhancement to prevent certain items from getting their state retrieved and just return the requested state instead of trying to get it from the OH server.

github.com/openhab/openhab-alexa

Item State Retrievable Parameter Support

opened 09:20PM - 14 Aug 19 UTC

closed 08:06PM - 04 Oct 19 UTC

jsetton

enhancement

@digitaldan I was thinking that we can add an item state retrievable parameter (…e.g. `itemStateRetrievable=false`), defaulting to `true` if omitted, for items that should only be used for commands. And as a temporary measure, to resolve any v2 backward compatibility issue, we could automatically set an item, configured with `autoupdate="false"`, as `false`, until we get deferred response support in place. For these items, the state provided in the directive would just be returned the same way it was done in v2 skill and the relevant `retrievable` property part of the discovery object would be set to `false`. So no report state would be generated for these items. What do you think?

ModuloFS · September 28, 2019, 7:22am

Thank you for your answer!

Meanwhile I have found an other workaround for this Problem. I used the expire binding to reset the Item-state after around 10 seconds to “UNDEF”:

Switch MY_ONEWAY_RF_SWITCH "Examplename" (gExample) [ "Lighting" ] {exec=">[ON: /turn/on/my/switch] >[OFF: /turn/off/my/switch]", expire="10s,UNDEF"}

This solution has the advantage for me to see the last sent state for a short time.

jeshab · October 11, 2019, 2:34pm

The enhancement I mentioned above has been released to the live skill. So for items with autoupdate=false, it will use the command value in the state response instead of trying to retrieve the item state.