apnar

I recall in other threads that there has been mention of keeping the current ISY platform going in parallel for a significant amount of time even after it was running on the new platform. I’d think you’re still going to have to deal with INSTEON silliness for years anyway supporting the old platform and that with a common code base the incremental effort to also support INSTEON on the new would be very low while enabling the sale of many more new units to majority INSTEON existing users. As an owner of both, I for one would love to reduce the number of boxes running

You can use a local Plex Media Server and the Plex Skill to play local music on an echo.

I doubt it will make a difference for this effort, but yes you can control the device directly (assuming it’s the load). It won’t activate the scene so some switches may show the wrong dim value but it will control the load. I do most of mine this way as it gives more direct control of dimming levels. If having the rest of the scene out-of-sync bothers you you can have a program detect the device change and clean up the scene.

I have everything going Alexa -> ISY Portal. I have Alexa Groups created for every room. I have 3 things in each group, the light, the fan, and the Echo for that room. For example: Alexa Group: Kids Room Devices: Kids Echo Kids Light (ISY Portal catagory: Device\Light) Kids Fan (ISY Portal catagory: Device\Fan, so I get high/med/low control) If I'm in that room and say "Alexa, turn on the light" it works. If I say, "Alexa, turn on the fan" I get the "a few things share the name fan" response. If instead I say "Alexa, turn on kids fan" it works as expected. What I'd like to know (and it's hinted by the responses above but not completely clear) is does anyone have it working where you can say "Alexa turn on the fan"? And if so how are you doing it exactly? Do you have every fan in the house just called "fan" and in a room group? If so how to you tell it to turn on a fan that's in another room?

Are you saying that you can walk into any room and say "Alexa, turn on the fan" and it will turn on only that rooms fan? As far as I know that only works with "light", but would love to get it to work for fans.

As far as I know there is no way to see the current backlight setting in the console. Doing a Query does not give you the correct value nor does it reset it to show 0. As best I can tell the console will always show you the value that was used to set the backlight for the last device of the that type. As an example say I have two simple 2477D dimmers, A and B. Both of which are set to 40% backlight. If I open the console and click on A or B they will both show 0%. If I query they will both show 0%. This isn't ideal but is at least understandable. I'd prefer it show the real value or if not possible at least something to show it doesn't know it like an X or such. If I select A and set it's backlight to 60% it will now show 60%. If I then click on B it'll show 60% (this is where things get confusing as it should show 40% or at least zero). If I query it'll still show the wrong value of 60%. If I want to set it to 60% (like I'm trying to set to adjacent switches to the same value) I now need to change it to something else then change it back to 60% for it to initiate the write. I hope that clears it up a bit. The really confusing part is when it's showing a wrong value of the last switch set.

@Michael any chance we could get this fixed in the console. As is it's really really confusing that if you change the backlight for one device and move to the next device it shows you the value from the previous device. Makes it even harder if you're trying to set a bunch of devices to the same value because as you move to each device you can't set it to the same value unless you change it to something else and then back. Ideally it'd be populated with the value queried from the switch or cached on the ISY from the last time set, but if that's not possible at least show something like "On X, Off X" when showing a device page so it's clear that the real value isn't being shown.

For Keypads I believe only the setting on the primary button does anything. If you want it 0 when off and full when on, then you want to select the "On 15 / Off 0" setting for the backlight of that primary button. In a program that'd be "Your Devices" Set <your primary button on the switch> "Backlight" then "On 15 / Off 0" from the drop down.

The bug still exists today (no way to see value of backlight setting and it not refreshing when moving between devices in the console) but it never impacted the values actually stored on the device. You either have a program somewhere writing backlight settings to the device or a faulty device. I’d first check your programs, then factory reset the device and restore it. You’ll likely need to manually reset the backlight value as I don’t think a restore rewrites that value. Pay no attention to that 0/0, the console shows the value used last to set the back light setting on the details of all devices or if no switch has been set since restart it shows 0/0.

That sucks. Thanks for looking! Hopefully Amazon adds it soon.

You likely don't need it, but a simple example of grabbing device ID appears to be in the answer to this thread: https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/86907/help-with-simple-skill-to-get-device-id.html

Thanks @bmercier. I found what I was looking at a while back and it was the same deviceID field referenced by @nadler above. I'd seen it in the context of address determination though: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/device-address-api.html I'm not sure if you'd have to request for your skill to be able to access address information or not to get the deviceID but deviceID does seem like it'd allow for you to figure out which echo made a specific call.

I find one of the greatest additions Amazon did to the smart home section was adding the ability to map a light to a specific echo so you can simply say "Alexa, turn on the lights" and it works in any room. I'd love to see that functionality expanded, in particular to things like "fan" or "TV" or any number of other words but doubt they'll add too many more. I'm not an Alexa developer but poked around a bit and believe they added something like an echo device ID to each request sent. That should let an app know which device a request is coming from. (If I'm wrong about that of course the rest of this isn't doable) I envision something like being able to create a generic multiplexed device in the ISY Portal. Then in the ISY portal being able to configure that generic device to map to a specific real device/scene/etc. based on the specific echo that made the request. You could also provide for assigning default real device or defaulting to a no-op. There'd be a little bit of work in populating the list of device IDs originally but I figure any time a request comes in for any generic device the specific echo device ID gets added to the list of known device IDs and is then available for mapping in all generic devices. You could make it easier to give friendly names to the device IDs by highlighting the last device ID to make a request. It wouldn't take too long for folks to build up the library of known device IDs. So as an example I have 2 echos with device IDs AAAA and BBBB. AAAA is in the family room and BBBB is in the living room. I create a device in the ISY portal called "fan". Then in the ISY portal I map any requests for "fan" from AAAA to control the family room fan and any requests coming from BBBB to control the living room fan.

Any suggestions on where to find these hacks or which ones you think are better than others?

It’s built into Alexa now. Go into the Alexa app, then smart home, then groups. Assign both a light and an echo to a group. From then on that echo will control that light when you ask to turn the lights on.

The simple “turn on the lights” command will only work for devices Alexa knows are classified as lights. In v2 of the skill, nothing has that classification. In v3 my understanding is that lighting devices are classified as “lights” so can be added to Alexa groups and can then be controlled with the simple “turn lights on/off” commands. There is no requirement for special naming, multiple accounts, or anything else. You just need to get a device that’s flagged as a light in the same group as an Alexa device and then it just works.

So I never moved over to the ISY portal for Alexa integration, still use the hue emulator. This feature worked perfectly for me the first time. I created a group for every room I have an echo in, added that room’s echo and that room’s light device to the group. Nothing in my setup is called “lights” all have names like “Kitchen Lights”. In every room I simply say “Alexa turn on the lights” and it works as expected. Love it. Sounds like the issue is device classification and the new V3 API will hopefully allow proper classification for portal devices. In the mean time you can fall back to old hue emulator if you can’t wait.

I've been using "alexa, what's on the calendar for today" most mornings. Links up nicely with my google calendars.

The product is warranted just the same if purchased through Amazon. When you call to do an RMA they will require you to send them a copy of the amazon invoice which is more of a pain than them easily being able to look it up. Other than that slight annoyance I've he'd no issues RMAing devices purchased through Amazon direct with SmartHome.

ditto. I just did a test asking for thee time within range of a gen 1 and gen 2 dot with those same versions and it worked as expected. They were about 30 feet apart though.

As an aside, assuming you're talking about the BWS Systems version of ha-bridge, the Latest version is 3.2.0. https://github.com/bwssytems/ha-bridge/releases/

I'm looking for 3 key features to make the Echos what I really want them to be: 1) unique IDs in requests so we can make "turn on the lights" work reasonably. 2) ability to have a Dot output voice feedback via local speaker but music through aux out/bluetooth. I have a number of Dots next to good speaker systems but want to be able to use voice commands without having to turn speaker systems on. 3) sync music amongst Echos. I can't see how this wasn't a day one feature when they started selling 6 and 12 packs.

Ran into a corner use case yesterday with multiple dots in range. I asked alexa to set a timer, the nearest one set the timer just as it should. When the timer was going off, I asked alexa to cancel the timer from the same spot. This time the one that was slightly further decided it was closet (I suspect due to the nearest one doing echo cancelation around the timer noise) and told me there were no active timers to cancel. I had to physically move closer to the one that had the timer going off to acknowledge it.

Not easily, but I believe it's theoretically possible. You'd need something external (like a Pi) for the ISY to make a network resource call to. Then have that box use one of the "push notification" methods to get Alexa to say what you want. Here's a forum thread on how to fake push notifications to Alexa: https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/40799/workaround-for-push-notifications.html

True. I was more thinking one pi and 4 cheap relays. Much less expensive than 4 IO lincs.