Hue Emulation not working with "new" Echo devices

Add-ons Bindings
1

I just wanted to share something in the hope that it helps someone else. If it’s already documented, please excuse, I couldn’t find anything, apart from this post here

I am currently on openHAB 2.5.0.M1. I have a few ZWave items exposed as lights through the Hue Emulation binding and control them through Amazon Echo. This has worked really well for me since openHAB 2.4.

This morning Echo reported that all of these devices were not responding. I ended up removing them and then put the emulation bridge binding in discovery mode - nothing. No devices found on Alexa. I tried the Alexa fix - nothing. I verified through description.xml and http://your-openhab-ip/api/testuser/lights?debug=true that devices were exposed and visible - still nothing.

I do have multiple Echos running. One Echo Dot 3d generation, one Echo 2nd generation and one Echo Dot 2nd generation.

The 2nd generation Echo Dot was my primary until I got the 3d generation echo. It occurred to me that I disconnect the 2nd generation Echo Dot a few days ago. Reconnected and discovery started working again and I control devices. Disconnect and devices go into not responding.

So it looks like the Hue Emulation binding does not work with the 3d generation echo devices. No issue for me since I’ll leave the 2nd generation Echo plugged in now. And as I said before it may well be that this is to be expected / documented etc. It was news to me and therefore hoping this comes in useful to others.

2

It’s not only different Echo generations, also different countries, firmwares and so on.
The local Hue support is very mixed unfortunately. And indeed the communication always goes through one of the installed Echos.
If you unplug that, you need to rediscover, try multiple times, sometimes reset your smarthome part of the Amazon account helps. Not a great situation, but I guess they are concentrating on the cloud.

3

Thank you David.