Yes, having actual Hue bridge can be problem. I also faced situation when Echo couldn’t find any item because other service was broadcasting on UPD port 1900.
Try to disconnect Hue bridge, restart openhab and scan for items from Echo. You can bring bridge back after successful pairing with OH.
I’m also seeing this. I had upgraded from a manual install, to the latest apt package beta (4?) a while back and had just noticed it tonight. At first I thought the command wasn’t going through at all, even though Alexa responded “OK.”
I upgraded to beta5 and uninstalled/installed the binding with no change.
If I have already defined the Item in PaperUI, how can I add the lable [“Switchable”] or [“Lighting”]?
How can I activate DEBUG logging for the hueEmulator?
I am also not able to see any devices in the Alexa App.
Thank you so much!
Hi Red_Wraith could you send me the rule you use to workaround the temperature offset of -1 please? Thanks!! 
You can use channels:
Item look in PaperUI:
In the text file:
Switch ZW_Lounge_Motion "Motion [%s]" <_motion> (gPresence, LivingRoom) { channel = "zwave:device:b03df6a3:node8:alarm_motion" }
And that’s how I’ve tagged the item for Alexa:
Switch AV_TV "TV" (AV, OHCloud) ["Switchable"] {http=">[ON:GET:http://ipaddress:1880/av_control?av=tvon] }
Thanks!
I’ve got this working great with LightwaveRF stuff
Switch Office_Cabinets "Cabinets" (Office) ["Switchable"] { lightwaverf="room=2,device=2,type=SWITCH" }
However, when I “discover devices” with Alexa, she also finds 9 devices named “Color”, which must be my genuine Hue bulbs. They are listed in my home.items file like so:
Switch LR_Ceiling_Toggle <switch> (LivingRoom) channel="hue:0210:001788401199:12:color" }
Why? They aren’t tagged with [“Switchable”) or anything? I can “forget” them in the Alexa app, but how do I prevent it happening in the first place?
I also had this issue for a while, where spurious “Color” items for real Hue bulbs show up in Alexa/Homekit. From what I can gather, this appears to be a “feature” of Paper UI: by default when you add certain Things in Paper UI, it automatically creates a linked item and tags it with [“Lighting”].
You can disable this my turning off “Simple Mode” in the Paper UI settings. Simple Mode seems to be what creates these automatic item links. However, at the time I tested this, simply disabling Simple Mode and recreating the Things would not fix the issue, the auto-created “Color” items still showed up. I got rid of them permanently by issuing the following commands from the OSGI console:
smarthome:items clear
smarthome:links clear
Then restart OH. That command should be pretty safe, everything will be recreated upon startup.
That worked thanks Anthony
I’m running what’s probably a unique config – openhab is on port 8080, but I’m using an apache server to proxy port 80 on an openhab hostname to openhab. The Hue Emulator is the only place I’ve found an issue with this config.
Using a small node.js script, I see that the ssdp response includes the IP address and port of the openhab instance: "LOCATION":"http://10.1.1.6:8080/api/discovery.xml", but port 8080 isn’t open to the network.
If I make a request for http://openhab.<my.home.domain>/api/discovery.xml, I get a response that includes <URLBase>http://10.1.1.6:8080/</URLBase>.
Is there a way to tell the Emulator that another URL should be used in these two instances?
I could see this potentially also being helpful for Docker users that aren’t using the host network stack.
PS, REST requests return the desired hostname format in the "link" item, probably because they have the HTTP Host header available.
I can and will open port 8080 to my local network, so this isn’t urgent.
Hello guys,
quick questions…
Can i also assign the Tags to groups… That i can say “Alexa, turn the Living Room on” and all my lights are going to be on?! Or should i have to add all items and create the groups in the Alexa App?
Another question is, that these “Tags” are also for my “Homekit Addon” ?!
Ty
Yes you can. You can assign a tag to any item, whether it’s tied to a binding or just virtual. I use tags on groups like this:
Group:Switch:OR(ON,OFF) outside_lights "Outside Lights" ["Switchable"]
Yes, the same tags ([“Lighting”], [“Switchable”]) also define which items are visible in HomeKit.
Is it possible to make synonym tags for the same item? Lets say we have a light in the hallway, but we also would like to call it entrance, tags[“Hallway”,“Entrance”,“Home”] or do we need to make duplicate items?
The Hue Emulator uses three specific tags [“Switchable”] being one, see the link below for more info. The synonym that you would like to speak is in the middle quoted element “Outside Lights”. So I expect that you would need to create multiple items that are all associated with the channel you would like to action on, and each would need the [“Switchable”], [“Lighting”], [TargetTemperature"]
https://github.com/openhab/openhab2-addons/tree/master/addons/io/org.openhab.io.hueemulation
Well so far this is how I have defined my items, which works fine(for the last month or so)
/*Hallway*/
Switch Light_Hallway "Hallway" (Group_Hallway,Lights,Group_LightLogging) [ "Lighting" ] { gpio="pin:20" } //Relay 12
However it would be nice if it somehow was possible to define several synonyms without having to create tons of items,rules,persitance, myopenhab, iftt etc just to make a synonym word..
I would suggest changing your “Hallway” element to something closer to your common phrases. So that the verbal command to Alexa would be more natural.
Currently your phrase would be…
Alexa, turn ON the Hallway.
If you more naturally, say something like…
Alexa, turn ON the Hallway lights.
Then you need to change your element to “Hallway lights”.
I have different tags also depending on if there is one or more than one light I am commanding.
Plural = “Toy room lights”
Singular = “Family room light”
I do have a Switchable All group item (as well as a Downstairs Lights group item), which may take care of part of your need, but I’m not aware of another way to create verbal aliases.
Hi
THX for the great binding. I was wondering if it is possible to display the music, that is actually played on the echo to my openhab devices e.g a tablet with habPanel.
THX
You could try creating a group in openhab with only one item in it. The group name would be a synonym for that item. Addressing commands to the group should then behave like the item. You could add multiple groups the same way and tag each one with [“Lighting”] or [“Switchable”]. No rules or any other configuration needed.
Additionally, you could do the same thing in the Alexa app itself (create a group with one item in it), but those go away if you have to reset your config.
IFTTT makes this somewhat possible. You can hook up the Alexa IFTTT channel to trigger when a new song is played, then you can notify your openhab system to update a string item with the name of the song. I use the IFTTT Maker channel to make an HTTP request to my openhab system.
The issue I’ve found with this approach is that it doesn’t seem to work with all streaming services. It works just fine when you are listening to Amazon Prime Music, but when listening to Spotify, the IFTTT applet never triggers.
@anthonygillet That’s a brilliant Idea with group to add synonyms! Can you add it to the wiki?
FYI information you can leave lights out, this way both alexa hallway on (save time…, 3 less words…) works as well as Alexa, turn ON the Hallway lights…
My guest normally use the full phrase while I use the short version.. Same as alexa news, instead of alexa give me my flash briefing, alexa weather and so on…
Does anyone know when the alexa skill will be avialable?