HueEmulation and Google Home support

Just wondering what this tag does?

I have just set this all up with my Echo Dots, and my new Google Home. Took a bit of configuring (second ip, forwarding ports etc. but I have it all working! I’m using the @staalebk jar, and dimming works on that now, although I had to try a couple of times.

Everything does now show as “Dimmable light”, even if they are defined as “Switchable” - I have a few things that are virtual switches (not actual devices). Don’t now if this will be an issue.

It will be nice if this can be folded into OH2. Is there a PR planned for these fixes soon?

Interestingly, google home can also give you the status of the lights as well (Alexa can’t do that).

Thanks for all the good work on this! got my google home yesterday, and it’s controlling my 38 devices today!

@Nicholas_Waterton hello mate. The iss tag is for the Imperihome binding.

The port 80 stuff needs to be available at all times for it to work unfortunately. Thats why I added another IP to my box, since I actually had some other important stuff running on port 80 on the main IP.

Has anyone noticed that when updating the items, the hue emulation does not update the list of devices exposed via the api? In $HOME/userdata/hueemulation/items this file is never updated once it exists. I removed a few items to be exposed to the hue emulation binding and the items file was never updated. I had to manually remove the file and restart the binding for the updated list to be exposed.

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I noticed that as well, but on OS X. Adding lights (Hue branded) that were already joined to the Hue bridge doesn’t bring in the color channel controls. I really have no idea why that is. Is color control not supported in the emulator? I also have a zipato color bulb (z-wave) joined into the emulator but cannot control its color channels either.

Hi all,

I am struggling with Google Home and emulated Hue devices. I have linked Google Home with the native Hue Bridge. Do I need to link with the emulated bridge or will it show the devices anyways? I am having issues with the custom addon so I used the hue emulation addon from the official repository and forwarded port 80 to 8080. /api/discovery.xml is reachable on both ports. Alexa sees the items but I want to use Google Home as complete Alexa replacement.

What is actually the next steps to configure Google Home?

Short update - IT WORKS! I just needed to restart OpenHAB service. Google Home discovers new devices but it seems there is a small issue with the “hacked” addon as there 2 wrong devices which are advertised through discovery but are not part of my .items file. I hope the needed changes will be commited to the “official” hue emulation addon. Thanks.

Hello All,

I’ve got this going (using the .jar from @staalebk on my Openhabian OH2 setup, but I’m having one major problem and a couple of minor ones.

The major problem is that about once per day, my Google Home devices will stop working with the emulation. They act like they’re still connected, respond to requests and say they’re doing the requested action, but nothing shows up in the OH logs and no action takes place. Rebooting the Google Homes or the rpi3 won’t fix the problem.

What will fix the problem is having the Google home unlink the hue devices then re-link. It will then work fine for another 24 hours or so and then the problem will show up again.

Has anyone else seen this issue?

I do have quite a few items (59), connected to an insteon hub. I believe the insteon side is working fine as the devices still respond normally via the web interface on Openhab when the Google home devices stop working.

If I shut down the OH system, Google home will report that it can’t talk to the devices, but in the “bad” mode, it’s like Google home thinks the commands are being sent and working.

This seems like a bug on the Google side, but I can’t find any similar reports for Google home and a normal hue bridge.

I do see some other errors when trying to do things like create and populate rooms on the Google Home interface. It nearly always says “something went wrong, please try again” on the first attempt then succeeds the second time.

The other problem I’ve noticed is that whenever you modify the items file in a way which effects the hueemulation, especially something like renaming or removing a device, the files in the hueemulation fold must be deleted then the system restarted or things will not work well at all. Normally producing massive amounts of warnings in the logs every few seconds. If you know how to fix it, that’s not a huge problem but it’s hard to figure out.

chortya, could you please let me know how you linked Google Home with the native Hue bridge? What do I have to do to activate the native hue bridge?

thank you

Native hue bridge works from scratch without openhab, you just beed to link your acvount inthe Google Home app under smarthome.

this might be a stupid question, but what account?

thank you

Hue account

https://support.google.com/googlehome/answer/7072090?hl=en

ok, is there a howto for dummies somewhere?

I installed OH2, added a few z-wave switches (all in the paper UI, nothing done with configurationfiles), then what?

when I open the HUE app it says “no new Hue bridge found”

Your talking about two different things. You can use Hue directly with Home without OpenHab, that is what Chortya is talking about.

With OpenHab, you have to use the modified hue-emulator binding found in this post (a little further back):

https://community.openhab.org/t/hueemulation-and-google-home-support/16283/47?u=rhinesel

You can’t use the normal one found in PaperUI.

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So I cannot use the “misc-hueemulation - 2.0.0.SNAPSHOT” that is found in the Paper UI under Add-Ons->Misc?

EDIT: I am sorry, that was a stupid question, I should read the posts more carefully.
but if I cannot use it, why is it there?

EDIT2: got the home to recognize and pair with the “hue bridge”, but it shows 0 devices. Is there anything else I have to do?

thanks

It works for other services.

@Daniel_Hermaan1 You need to add the [:Switchable"] or [“Lighting”] tags to the items in your items file for the ones you want to be exported to hue.

Can I do that in Paper UI?
If not, where would I do it?

Can someone help me figure this out? I had the regular hue binding installed but wanted to have my Google Home to access openHAB so I uninstalled the regular hue binding and added the hue emulation jar. It doesn’t show up under bindings but does under Services. I configured it but nothing happens. It doesn’t find my Hue Bridge.

I’m on a Raspberry Pi3. I don’t know Linux that well.

Tommy @tdsheppard77
I don’t have google home, but use Alexa it works very similar though:
The Hue binding talks to the Hue bridge (and thus Hue lights), enabling OH2 to interact with hue lights.
Hue emulator is a service, which essentially emulates a Hue bridge (OH2 acts as if it were a Hue bridge). Hue emulator enables Alexa and Google Home to talk to OH2:
Hue lights <-> Hue bridge <-> Hue Binding on Openhab2
Google Home/Alexa <-> Hue emulator in OH2
So if you have hue lights you need the binding, if you have a google home you need the emulator, if you have both you need both.
Finally, to have google home talk to your hue lights, in addition to the above, you will need to have the items tagged in a way that makes them discoverable for google home (e.g., adding the tag [Switchable] to the item definition).
Hope that helps

@lipp_markus Thanks. So I reinstalled the hue binding. I think I’m going to have to format my SD card and start over. From what I read I have to put port 80 in the hue emulation configuration so Google Home can see it. However, I also have NGINX set up and that uses port 80 (right??) I tried adding a second ip address and doing a port forward but I couldn’t ever find step by step instructions on how to do that (I know just enough Linux to cause damage) so I think I may have broken things. Unless someone can help me walk through that or point me to a step by step that will tell how how to do it…