I have had Alexa for several months now and for most part all is well. Except… I have temperature/humidity sensors around my house but I cant get Alexa to tell me either the temp or RH from any of these devices.
Today I installed a Google Home Mini and very soon I discovered I could ask it for a specific room/Thermostat temperature and/or humidity. That prompted me to link each of my temperature sensors to ST simulated thermostat. I can now say “Hey Google, was is the temperature in the {thermostat-name}” Same works for humidity as well. Back to Alexa,
I added these simulated thermostats to Alexa and, yay, she now tell me temperature of each of these devices. She will not tell me the RH however. Keeps saying, “Sorry {hermostat-name} does not support this”
I tried using different DH and while they still worked within Google home, Alexa keeps saying RH is not supported.
I then tried to get this info from the “real” thermostats (nest, Ct100) in my house and got the same results.
Anyone have any idea why Alexa cant get the humidity from these devices??? Anyone have a workaround??
I’d like to figure this out as well. Your post encouraged me to get Alexa to report the temperature of my Xiaomi sensor. Adding the capability of “Thermostat” to the DTH code allowed me to discover it in Alexa and report temperature. Unfortunately, I suspect getting Alexa to report humidity from our ST thermostats may be a limitation with the ST Alexa skill.
That actually worked for you?? While I was able to add this modified device (handler) to Alexa, selecting it would hang the Alexa App with the message “Waiting For Smartthings”. Asking Alexa for the temperature and she responded “Sorry I don’t know that one”.
You may have to use a custom skill like Ask Alexa to get reporting around your house from devices. The thread is long, but you can find more information here: [RELEASE] Ask Alexa
I used this for temperature on my non ecobee sensors: Just needed to add 1 virtual switch to select for a dumb switch.
It creates a Virtual Thermostat that you tie to a sensor and then Alexa can report the temperature. I probably could be modified for humidity as well but I am clueless for these sort of things.
Ask Alexa will do it but it is a “to-do” to get going.
After adding the line of code to the DTH, I went to the Alexa smart app and was able to add the sensor as a Thermostat. I then had Alexa rediscover devices to find the sensor. I did have some trouble at first getting Alexa to work… the name of my sensor device must have confused her. She didn’t like “What’s the temperatue sensor temperature?” I’m guessing having the intent word of temperature in the device name was problematic. So I renamed the sensor “Kitchen” in ST and rediscovered devices. However, “What’s the kitchen temperature?” didn’t work either. I think it was because I have an Alexa group called Kitchen. It finally worked when I named the sensor “First Floor” in ST. (No conflicts.)
Got it working but took some fiddling. Here is what I had to do once Alexa had discovered the new device:
Within the Alexa App, located the new device and selected it.
The App seems to hang as I described above
I selected “Edit” and then tried to edit name. It would not let me.
I backed out of the edit screen then from the new screen selected the Edit option once more.
I could now edit the name if I wanted to.
That was it. I could now get Alexa to read back temperatures from each of the new devices.
Adding the Thermostat ability to the DH was a great find. Thanks for that. I added it to any sensor I wanted Alexa to be able to report on. So far, they all work.
As for RH… No go
A major plus for Google Home here. Once I modified the DH in ST nothing else needed to be done. These devices just showed up in Home and worked both for Temp and RH.
I use a Sensi thermostat that has it’s own Alexa skill available, but I don’t have it installed and instead operate it via ST integration. I might try installing the skill and see if it reports humidity. That might at least narrow down whether this is a problem specific to the ST Alexa skill. (Not sure when I’ll get to it though…I’m kind of lazy )