HueEmulation and Google Home support

It was posted in another thread Google Home Support that in order for Google Home to discover a Hue Hub, it looks for the device on port 80 and will ignore the location provided in the discovery.xml. So in other words for the HueEmulation to work with Google Home, it will have to run on port 80. I just bought a Google Home to compare with my Amazon Echos and I am not home to set it up and verify that this is in fact the case. I was hoping if anyone with a Google Home could test this? It will be another day or two until I get home for testing. Here is some documentation on the issue:

HA-Bridge
Support for Google Home Issue Ticket

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Hi, I have a Home as well. You are correct about port 80, also it was much stricter, or at least has a different interpretation, of the Hue API and the SSDP messaging then other devices. I have a branch of the HueEmulation binding that fixes those issues and works with the google home, I’ll try and get it posted soon, there’s still a bit of cleanup I need to do.

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@digitaldan Thanks for the update. I wanted to confirm this before I opened an issue ticket on github. I had a look at the source code and was going to see what I could do to help solve this issue. Looking forward to using your changes and getting this working with Google Home. I now need to start evaluating between the Amazon echo and Google Home to see which stays in the house.

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@digitaldan any eta on when you will push the fixes for Google Home? I apologize for sounding impatient, I just want to test out my Google Home for comparison between my Amazon Echo to make my return decision. I would be willing to test out the jar for any feedback.

I have it working and stable, I will try and push something tomorrow ! I ended up making signifiagant changes to the binding to make it work, I have also not tested it against the echo or harmony, but suspect there will not be any issues. I will also post a pre built jar on github to download.

My changes can be found at:

You can download the addon here:

Note that this has not been tested very well and may contain issues. This also adds a new configuration option to advertise a different port (say 80) then what openhab is running on (usually 8080). This is useful if you want continue to run openHAB on 8080 and use a firewall rule, netcat, proxy server, etc… to forward the request. As mentioned Home will attempt to make an http request on port 80 only.

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@digitaldan I got the plugin installed and working with Google Home. However, I can not get it to work with the Amazon echo. I went to remove all of the current devices and tried to rediscover the devices again with the new plugin and no go. I will try and do more testing. Let me know if there is anything you would like for me to try and / or test.

  • Garrett

@digitaldan I wanted to provide you with some more updates. I was able to get the the amazon echo to discover my devices, but I had to use the older binding prior to the Google Home changes. So it looks like something broke in the discover process of the hue emulation code.

  • Garrett

Thanks, were you able to get Google home to control your devices? I have some time to day to test, I’ll give it a try here soon with the echo.

sorry missed your other post!

@digitaldan I have spent the last few hours trying to figure out where the issue happens, I would look at the discovery service (HueEmulationUpnpServer.java).

I did get Google Home working and it finds my devices perfectly. I wish I can say controlling them with Google Home is perfect, but for some reason Google Home does not like to have room names in the device names so control of my lights do not work or she turns on all the lights in the room. This is obviously a google issue. My issue is that I have different lights in different parts of the room. So I use the room name to distinguish the different lights. e.g. Master Bedroom Main Light vs Guest Bedroom Main Light. Hopefully google can fix this.

Let me know if there is anything you would like me to do. I am around if needed.

Thanks for your help. The changes to our SSDP message for home does not work for the echo, so it can’t find OH at all. if I can’t figure out what’s breaking it for the echo I may resort to sending multiple SDDP messages, the older version and the updated version for Home (and others?). I’ll play around some more.

@digitaldan Have you looked here to see if this information will help?

ha-bridge

That is very useful! My original idea about sending multiple SSDP messages was not so original :slight_smile: Thank for saving me a bunch of time!

I am glad I could be of help. I wish I could help further in the code department, but my knowledge of osgi, openhab2 binding development is lacking.

  • Garrett

can you try https://github.com/digitaldan/openhab2-addons/releases/tag/HueEmulator-google-home again?

@digitaldan I only see the jar posted yesterday.

  • Garrett

i replaced the jar with an updated one, but the release looks that same, it should work.

I think you got a winner! Both amazon echo and google home see both my devices. Just to be safe I removed the devices from Google Home and re-paired it with the hue emulation plugin. So far no issues.

Thanks again for all of your hard work!

  • Garrett

Hi @digitaldan, I’ve been lurking this thread. I also have both Echo and Google Home, and your latest jar seems to have things working on both platforms. Your efforts are much appreciated. Thanks