mark-vo

Same issue here and the latest version released today (0.4.2) still doesn't work with Harmony according to a follow-up post on the MiCasaVerde forum. I'll wait a bit longer for the developer to track down the issue. In the meantime, here's what I discovered after some tinkering with version 0.4.1 yesterday. I have 3 Harmony hubs and found that they worked with the ha-bridge (even after adding or editing devices) until I forced a "re-Pair" on one of the hubs at which point discovery would hang and that particular hub reported all the devices as not working. No amount of re-Pairing would fix it, even after removing the Hue device or rebooting the Harmony hub. And yet, oddly, the other two Harmony hubs continued to work with all the same devices. It seems the Harmony cannot initially pair with the ha-bridge, but will discover existing ha-bridge devices just fine if the hub previously paired with the amazon-echo-bridge at the same IP address. What I did to recover the "broken" Harmony hub was to temporarily reboot the RPi with amazon-echo-bridge (version 0.2.0), re-Pair the Harmony hub (it quickly discovered the older set of devices), and then reboot again with the ha-bridge. Voila, the latest device list re-appeared. It's less complicated than it sounds since I keep both emulators listed in crontab and simply comment out the one I don't want to run at boot.

@ Barry Lots of familiar stuff in your setup, even though we've gone down independent paths. Thanks for mentioning tightvnc in an earlier post, it's been really helpful configuring my two RPi2s (now also running the latest version ha-bridge, which I've confirmed maxes out at 43 devices per instance). My HA system has been evolving since 1985 (not a typo) and there is still a lot of legacy hardware running in the background (I was a hardware developer in a past life), including a custom SBC that manages the reflex lighting based on hardwired PIR sensors in every room. (My wife and I haven't touched a light switch in 30 years ) Besides the RPis, there are two Arduinos (with custom shields) that manage RFID tags and act as an Insteon command gateway for very fast programmed response, an ISY994i for REST scene control, three Harmony Hubs for a bunch of media components, one Echo (so far), three 15 inch in-wall touchscreens, a Davis weather station, two PCs running Win7 and Apache server, and 2 Asus routers connecting about 72 devices. Whew. My new full time job is keeping all this stuff running... Anyway, like you mentioned, visitors to our house are always amazed, especially now with extensive voice controls. What fun.

Well said. As with most emerging technologies, the "eggheads" share ideas to push ahead of what's commercially available and work out ways to get non-compatible devices talking to each other. Home automation is a huge, many-tentacled monster at the moment, with too many players in the market all pulling in different directions. Amazon has the right idea by encouraging us open source junkies to play. As Jimbo mentioned above, UDI is jumping in too. We all win.

Well, I ran up against a few issues with the new emulator (ha-bridge-0.3.5.jar), but I've been able to reach a new limit of 43 devices using a single RPi2 - still not the holy grail of 50 devices per hub (according to Amazon), but better than 28. The device database is also easier to manage since everything is in a single file (device.db). If you're having issues with Alexa discovering devices (like I did at first), try these tips: 1) Add "-Dupnp.config.address=192.168.x.x" to the command line invoking the JAR file, where 192.168.x.x is the IP of your RPi2 (or PC). You should see the correct upnp.config.address when running the configurator at 192.168.x.x:8080. 2) I found when making any changes or additions to the device list in the HA Bridge configurator, the Echo would fail to discover ANY connected devices unless I rebooted the RPi2 and then repeated discovery on the Echo. It's a pain, but I added a crontab entry to automatically restart the HA Bridge when rebooting so it's just part of the process now Hope this helps. I've got my Echo controlling about 30 lighting scenes, three thermostats, multiple media components in our home theater, and handling home control queries (announced over the house intercom).

I don't think Alexa can manage dim/bright commands just yet. What I'd really like is for the Echo to just pass spoken commands in text form back to my server via REST. I already have a pretty sophisticated PHP script that parses a large number of commands sent from Autovoice / Tasker to the server and I can easily manage the command structure that way (similar to the Alexa intents).

So far I've only tried two emulators at a time (Hue + Hue on 2 RPi's and Hue + WeMo on one RPi) but the echo consistently discovers both, though each has a limit: 26-28 devices for the Hue emulator and 10-14 for the WeMo emulator. Barry, your setup sounds very impressive. I've been into DIY home automation since 1985 (custom stuff) but the last 3-5 years have really opened up the possibilities. I just finished replacing EVERY bulb in the house with LEDs which was a huge undertaking since we have lots of light fixtures with every imaginable bulb type. Voice control is the most fun though. I started integrating voice about 2 years ago using Tasker + Autovoice + Google TTS and now all the lights, media rooms, and HVAC units are voice activated. The Echo finally adds in hands-free voice control. Not sure what's left to do

Yep. I did the same thing when I switched to my RPi2. (Now using two Rpi2s to get past the 28 device limit, with different data files of course.)

There is indeed a hard limit of "around" 28 devices with the Hue emulator, but sometimes only 26 or 27 will be discovered by Echo. As madmartian noted, it appears related to the 20 second discovery time used by the Echo. To get past the limit (I have over 50 devices), I first tried adding the WeMo emulator to my RPi2 and got up to around 32-42 devices total, but the WeMo emulator (running in Python) is even slower and discovery was pretty hit or miss. Presently I have two RPi's running the Hue emulator (each with a different list of devices) and the Echo is consistently finding 46 devices so multiple Hue emulators do appear to be additive. I can get up to a maximum of 50-56 during discovery, but NOT reliably so I'm just sticking with the 46 for now.

Thanks for the info, madmartian! I've been using the Hue emulator for a few weeks and it's working well, but it has a limit of about 27-28 devices. So today I tried out the WeMo emulator - I have good news and bad news The Good: The Python script runs great on my RPi2 and it's much easier to maintain since as you noted everything is in one editable file. It's also WAY faster to load than the Hue Emulator JAR file, which takes about 40 seconds to start up after booting the RPi2. The Bad: I can only get Alexa to discover 28 devices ... beyond that she reports "I couldn't find any devices". From viewing the cmd window, it appears that the emulator is too slow responding to each device search and Alexa times out at 20 seconds. This is probably the same issue that prevents the Hue emulator from handling more than 28 devices. (BTW, omit the '-d' parameter when starting fauxmo.py unless you want to view responses ... that slows discovery response time considerably.) It's possible that running the WeMo emulator on a PC will be faster, but in my HA system I prefer to use the RPi since my PC server is already heavily loaded (web server, openhab, and a bunch of other stuff). UPDATE: I've been able to get past the 28 device limit by running BOTH the Hue emulator (with 28 devices) and WeMo emulator (with another 14 devices) concurrently on the RPi2 . Alexa is now reporting 42 devices discovered!

I had this happen when I was initially testing the RPi...all the devices would appear as "offline" in the Echo app, but they worked and would individually reappear when I asked Alexa to turn them on. If the Echo can't find anything during discovery, try rebooting it (unplug the adapter for a few seconds).

So far the RPi2 is working very well for me (similar to when I had the emulator running on a PC). How slow is "sluggish"? With the RPi2, the light consistently goes ON or OFF exactly 1.5 seconds after I finish speaking (i.e.- "Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights"). Note that it can take up to 3-4 seconds for the first command after asking Alexa to rediscover devices, but I only need to do that when making changes or additions to the device list.

Barry, I received the RPi2 yesterday and got it working with both wired and wireless connections. However, it took some fiddling to get everything working and I ended up having to copy the "data" folder (which contains all the device data) from my Win8 laptop to the RPi2 since configurator.html kept corrupting the files. Most of the device data is nested in the "data/elasticsearch/nodes/0/indices/device/0/index" folder and some or all of the entries would get killed every time I started up configurator.html on the RPi which in turn caused the Echo to fail discovery. FYI, I did notice that response is a bit slower with a wireless connection, but it's barely noticeable.

Sounds just like my weekend! I've had the emulator running on a Win8 tablet since I got the Echo last week and decided yesterday to resurrect an old RPi I had lying around to see how it would fare. Besides being much slower than the Win8 (the emulator takes well over 8 minutes to load), configurator.html is somewhat hit-or-miss. I had to reboot the Echo twice before it would find the devices and they often appear "OFFLINE" in the Echo app even though they usually respond to commands. I have the RPi wired to my router while the Win8 machine is on WiFi, which could be part of the problem. For now it's working on the old RPi but I've ordered an RPi2 to try out. One other issue I found with mapper00007.exe is that custom ON/OFF URLs have to be manually "re-edited" before they stick.