Amazon Echo

@chrisb,

My Ubi’s at this point have be relegated to voice responses to actions taken. Once Amazon or someone using their service tool figures out how to do it.

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There was definitely some thing to like about Ubi… I love their integration with ST and I love their custom command and custom announcements, but that’s about the end of it. It never really evolved beyond beta like status I’m afraid.

And the hard is really not great. It generally works well low noise situations when relatively close to the device and facing it and speaking a simple phrase. But complex phrases or background noise or when you’re not looking at the device… meh… 35% hit rate at best.

That is the definitely a big weakness compared to the Echo. One thing I found better in the Ubi was the wiki inquiry responses seem more through/detailed.

Grouping is excellent in echo. Looks like you can set up as many groups as you want, at least I haven’t run into limit and I have a lot. You can put a device into multiple groups which is very nice. And you can put devices from different “services” into the same group. Also, you can set up a group with just one device.

So for example, you could definitely have your “basement lights” group. You could also include those lights in a group called “all lights”. And you could have another group called “East wing” that included all the basement lights and all the kitchen lights.

We have one room that I always call the study and my housemate always calls the office. So we just made two groups for the same devices. That way, he can say “turn on the office” and I can say “turn on the study” and it works for both of us.

Finally, you can create a group based by purpose. Echo doesn’t care where the lights are physically. So I have one group called “bedtime” that is a pathway lights for the living room to my room. It has just some of the lights from each of those rooms. That way I can say “turn on bedtime” and after I’m in bed say “Turn off bedtime.”

All good. :sunglasses:

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In regards to the locks, does anyone know of a SmartApp that will let me tie a lock to a virtual switch? Some cursory Googling and attempts to browse the SmartApps isn’t yielding much.

Tie the virtual switch to a Routine (Hello Home phrase) and have the routine lock or unlock the lock.

You can use MichaelS 's Alexa Helper smartapp after you create the virtual switches.

Forcing Alexa to find more devices. Once I figured out I had to discover devices I was able to add the first 4 devices from ST to Alexa . Put them in groups in the app ( not just the room in ST app) so she knew where to find them and everything was going along fine. I was so impressed.
So I continued my journey through the house adding more lights and setting up my rooms in ST.
When I was done I opened Echo app again and hit discover and waited for “her” to add the rest of my lights. Now I can’t get her to discover anything other than the initial four GE lights from her first discovery. What am I doing wrong ?

Open ST apps. Under smartapps, open Amazon echo smartapps and edit “my device list” if your switches are not there.press done when you are finished. Rediscover devices again with you echo.

I don’t understand how to make this work with “turn on/turn off” to map to “lock/unlock” in a foolproof way.

I’m using a virtual On/Off Button Tile for my switch, and I’ve setup one routine to lock and one to unlock. I’m using the Alexa Helper app to run the Lock routine when the Button Tile is turned on, and to run the Unlock routine when the Button Tile is turned off. I setup the Button Tile device to be accessible by Alexa and it works from that side as I’d expect. When I say “turn on the garage door lock”, the button tile turns on, the app picks it up, and it triggers the routine which locks the door. When I say “turn off the garage door lock”, the button tile turns off, the app picks it up, and it triggers the routine which unlocks the door.

My problem is that when somebody manually operates the lock the lock and the virtual button get out of sync. Let’s say I turn on the lock with “Alexa, turn on the garage door lock”. The virtual button turns on, and the lock locks. Then, somebody comes home and opens the lock with a code or a key. The virtual button is still on, but the lock is unlocked. Next, I remember that the door was left unlocked so I say “Alexa, turn on the garage door lock”. Because the virtual button is still on, the app won’t pick up a change and won’t trigger the lock routine.

In the thread you linked you mentioned using a momentary tile, which is fine but I don’t see how to make it work for both “on” and “off”. You can send it “on” commands all day but if you link an action to “off” it fires immediately. It’s good for firing a single action but something like a toggle requires being able to track the state of the device.

What would be ideal would be something like The Big Switch but which also included lock devices.

You can use two momentary button tiles, one for on and one for off. That way, it can’t get out of sync.

My trouble is how to expose that to Echo, because it uses the name of the device for the command. If I were to use two Momentary Contact switches, what would I name the two devices?

In my case, there is a virtual toggle switch called “Garage Door Lock”. That allows me to say either “Turn on the Garage Door Lock” or “Turn off the Garage Door Lock”. This is pretty natural sounding. It’s not as good as “Alexa, lock the garage door”, but it fits with all the other "Turn on the " commands that my family is already used to. What I’m not willing to do is add things like “Alexa, turn on the garage door locked”/“Alexa, turn on the garage door unlocked”.

If it makes some sense in English my family will probably remember it. If it’s some weirdo hack job of a command it’ll never get used.

How about “Turn on Lock Garage”, and “Turn on Unlock Garage” ? Echo gets 2 devices.

A momentary button tile is always off except for the very brief moment when it is “pressed.” Like a classic doorbell button. In terms of commands, it sends the in, then the off.

So you have two options:

A) Use a binary switch (called “simulated switch” in the device types). This is a regular switch which is on until you flip it off or off until you flip it on. Like a classic light switch. So for this you Think of “on” as locked and “off” as unlocked. Assign a routine that locks the lock to that switch being on. Assign the routine that unlocks the lock to that switch being off.

B) alternatively, use two separate momentary switches (called “momentary button tile” in the device types). This is like the classic doorbell button. Now you will only tell echo to turn on a button.

Assign the routine that locks the lock to the first button. Assign a routine that unlocks the lock to the second button.

When you say “Alexa, turn on lock routine” you are turning on The first momentary button and you are going to run the routine that locks the lock.

When you say “Alexa, turn on unlock routine” you were turning on the second momentary button and you are going to run the routine that unlocks the lock. But notice that you never say “turn off…”

Scenario “A” is what I’m doing right now, and it has the problem I outlined above. It works if every interaction with the lock originates from the virtual on/off devices. It fails to work correctly the moment somebody interacts with the lock locally. This needs to be a two-way relationship to work. ST will get an update when somebody operates the lock, but I need a way for that to be sent back to the Virtual Switch for it to work right.

Scenario “B” has weirdo grammar problems which I’ve outlined above. I don’t know of any natural-English way to map the momentary contact buttons to “lock”/“unlock” without it sounding highly contrived. I won’t even bother to put that sentence in front of my wife, because I’ll get The Look again.

Isn’t there an app out there the will turn a switch on when the lock it unlocked (manual with a code or key) and that app will turn a switch off when locked? This app could turn your virtual switches on and off… I swear there was an app that did this

That was what I was looking for in the first place. Something like The Big Switch but which included locks.

Look at this

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Thanks @Navat604 , I didn’t realize I needed to add them to the echo app in ST before Echo could discover them. That did the trick

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I believe that’s the opposite of what Luma is looking for. That one causes changing a lock to then trigger the change in a switch.

Luma wants changing a switch to trigger the change in a lock. That’s so It can be used with echo.

I’m may not have read it correctly. But I was thinking he has a virtual switch that when it on the door locks… If someone manualy un locks the door he can’t lock it again because the virtual switch is on. I was thinking the app would see the door unlock and turn the virtual switch off.