Plugin developer question.

How do you tell ISY and thus Alexa what kind of device your node is.

The hints do not seem to be respected but I may not be using the correct ones.

Specifically I am trying to tell her that the node is a temperature / thermostat, based on a user request.

Let me know if you have any breadcrumbs.

Where are these "hints" defined in a plugin?

Hold on... I was just looking through the Venstar plugin, and found these lines:

id = "THERMOSTAT:
hint = 0x010C0100 # Residential/HVAC/Thermostat

...

id = "SENSOR:
hint = 0x01030300 # Residential/Sensor/Climate Sensor

On 11/8/2025 at 11:30 AM, sjenkins said:

Plugin developer question.

How do you tell ISY and thus Alexa what kind of device your node is.

The hints do not seem to be respected but I may not be using the correct ones.

Specifically I am trying to tell her that the node is a temperature / thermostat, based on a user request.

Let me know if you have any breadcrumbs.

Hints are a way to tell what type of device this is, but this never really took off.

So far Alexa mostly recognizes insteon and ZWave types. So set the hint to a known Zwave or insteon type.

For a thermostat, 4.8.x.x should work.

Just make sure that /rest/nodes/yourdevice returns a type 4.8.x.x

@bmercier thanks,

I was using a different one; I’ll give this one a shot and we will test and report back here for documentation.

@bmercier ,

sorry to bug on this one, but as I am looking at my hints across my plugins. I have been using the github docs at:

GitHub

hints/hint.yaml at master · UniversalDevicesInc/hints

Node Server device node hints specification. Contribute to UniversalDevicesInc/hints development by creating an account on GitHub.

but digging a bit I see in the wiki there is a less complete, but labelled 0.2 version:

https://wiki.universal-devices.com/Node_Hints_Documentation

They are a fair bit different in their specifications.

Your 4,8,x,x suggestion would give me wildly different answers depending on which one I use.

Is there a third place you are getting this from? I do not see anything in the developers docs which are linked from the main UDI site and eisy-ui.

19 minutes ago, sjenkins said:

Is there a third place you are getting this from? I do not see anything in the developers docs which are linked from the main UDI site and eisy-ui.

This is not well documented. Comes from my experience of developing the Alexa skill.

@bmercier Good enough for me.

I will offer, if you have scraps of notes on hints or anything you want to puke out of your brain on the subject, to update the hints docs on the wiki and/or the github. Maybe a link from the developer docs.

A while ago @Michel Kohanim asked me to do some docs based on my plugin docs. I failed him on that due to my non-use of vscode. Happy to help with this an let you do the more "high value add" stuff.