New Binding: Amazon Echo

Working now. Changed from he: to homekit: and had to add the label text:

Did not work:
Switch testswitch ["homekit:Test Switch"]
Switch testswitch ["he:Test Switch"]

Worked:
Switch testswitch "test switch" ["homekit:Test Switch"]

Thanks

@tpmcleod24 That’s great you got it working. The documentation is obviously not very good ;-( . I’ll try and update the readme to be more clear.

quite welcome. nice thing is that if you have an apple product, you dont have to change the code


Is anyone else getting 404 errors for those github links? I’m interested but I can’t even start because both the links lead to a 404.

Found it!

Has been moved to

you might want to update OP

1 Like

dont even need to go to github. its part of the services in oh2

1 Like

Hi everybody,

thanks for the great work! I am a huge fan with the echo and some echo dots. I got it working with the seperate echo ha bridge and knx over openhab 1 some months ago. Not a very beautiful solution


Is this hueemulation binding now the best practice for connecting? Is it possible to use this binding for homekit / siri at the same time (with the same config). How is your experience? Seems like the most universal solution.

Or does the echo binding have some special advantages?

I am not sure after the different discussions and solutions. Do we know anything about google, yet?

Thanks for your insight!

Gabriel

1 Like

Hi, no opinions and suggestions?

Just interested what made you switch from Home Assistant to OpenHAB, and how has that worked out.

Mostly just waiting on OpenHab 2 to come out. The API makes it a lot more flexible to develop something custom, and the community is far bigger. There’s still problems with both, mostly supporting all the different products, for example I have a Lockwood Zwave lock that isn’t compatible with either. OpenHab 2 just looks and feels great.

I too am going to take the plunge to OpenHab2. I just saw the Home Assistant site in regards to Echo. I already have the big echo and ordered a Dot V2. I am running OpenHab 1.something on a BeagleBoard-XM and it works fine, although I also put emonCMS on it as well, which has slowed it a bit. Time for a new server. I do like that Home Assistant is basically Python, but I am muddling through Java well enough with OpenHab. The Hue emulation is a fabulous addition, but I am curious: With OpenHab 2, can you have the Hue Emulation binding working alongside of a ‘customizable’ Echo API (if there will be one), or will it just mess with Alexa’s head? Essentially, can you have the Echo turn on and off things like Hue, and also “Alexa, tell OpenHab blah, blah
” after customization applied?

Yes, you can use a combination of the HA-Bridge and/or other options at the same time. The key is that you say “Alexa, tell OpeHAB” first which initiates the intended handler/skill where as, for example, ‘Alexa, turn off bedroom lights’ would use the Smart Home API or available bridge instead.

Hello, I have been using this binding with Openhab2 and some of the new Echo Dots. Everything works great, very impressive work so far! Thanks for getting this functionality into Openhab.

However, I am seeing an issue with discovering devices through Alexa. I have about 40 devices in Openhab. I find as soon as I add the [“Lighting”] or [“Switchable”] tag to more than 32 devices, the Alexa app will report all devices as Offline and will not discover any new ones. 32 devices work fine, but if I expose 33 then they all go offline.

I turned on debug logging and I was able to see Alexa hitting the discovery API, so it’s reading it. I checked the API pages that Alexa is hitting and they all seem valid, although I didn’t run it through a JSON parser I suppose.

I found these posts:

I see you have tested with 30 devices, could you do a bit more testing with 32+? If you need any logs or information from me, let me know.

By the way, I would be able to work around this for my setup if I could make different devices available through Homekit than are available through the Hue Emulator. I use the iOS 10 Home app as my primary touch input control, but since the Hue Emulator and Homekit both share the same [tagging] in Openhab2, I am essentially limited to 32 devices in Homekit as well if I also want Alexa support. Is there currently any way (even a hack) to allow specification of different lists of devices through the Homekit emulator and Hue emulator?

In case it helps, my devices are Insteon switches and dimmers, defined like this (just a sample, like I said I have ~40):

Dimmer kitchen_pendant_lights "Kitchen Pendant Lights" <dimmablelight> ["Lighting"] {insteonplm="xx.xx.xx:F00.00.01#dimmer"}
Switch kitchen_sink "Kitchen Sink" <light> ["Lighting"] {insteonplm="xx.xx.xx:F00.00.02#switch"}

Is this the same emulator thats included in the paper ui?

Anybody been having issues with the hue emulator and Amazon echo?.. just got two echo dots and a regular echo and when I issue commands to turn lights on or off they are very delayed. It’s almost like the echos can’t find openhab or its not responding quick enough. As far as everything else goes if I’m using habpanel to turn a light on or off its instant.

I finally got my echo dot to work with the hue emulator. I had to download the latest snapshot to get the new changes for the hue emulator plugin. My issue for me was that I have several networks on my container that runs openhab. Once I got the latest snapshot and configured the hue emulator to use the correct network, all is working well. The Alexa app discovered all of my lights that are configured with the appropriate flag. There is a slight delay, but that is mostly probably due to Alexa converting my voice to an action.

This delay seems to be related to having multiple echos on the same network. I have 3 and experience the same, but if i remove two, I have no problems. It’s an issue brought up in github with similar habridge project.

Quick Question


I have enabled the HUE Emulation/Amazon Echo Binding in OH2, I have turned on pairing and Alexa can’t find my items.

I am using A TCP based switch which is based on a OH1 binding I believe
is that an issue or will the emulation see any items as long as they are tagged correctly?

I have tried tagging using the recommended tags included in this post and using the Lighting tag from the Docs - none work

Switch Hallway { tcp="<[10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(m90.map)'], >[ON:10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(90.map)'],>[OFF:10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(90.map)'] ", autoupdate="false" } [ "homekit:Hallway Lights" ]

and

Switch Hallway { tcp="<[10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(m90.map)'], >[ON:10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(90.map)'],>[OFF:10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(90.map)'] ", autoupdate="false" } [ "he:Hallway Lights" ]

and

Switch Hallway { tcp="<[10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(m90.map)'], >[ON:10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(90.map)'],>[OFF:10.5.1.6:3040:'MAP(90.map)'] ", autoupdate="false" } "Hallway Lights" [ "Lighting" ]

All with no luck
 the switches can not be found.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Squid

The Tag has to be defined befire your binding configuration.

@hmerk

Thank you for your assistance
I have tried three different iterations of the tag, 2 which are mentioned in this thread, the other in the DOCS
none of the 3 tags were discoverable by Alexa. I tried:

Switch Hallway "Hallway" [ "Lighting" ]
Switch Hallway [ "homekit:Hallway Lights" ]
Switch Hallway [ "he:Hallway Lights" ]

Any suggestions?