Short version. I currently have 2 “locations” in my smart things account, my house and my Mother’s apartment. When I go to enable my Smartthings Skill for my Amazon Echo I choose to link it to the location which is my house. When I go to have Echo scan for devices however it picks up the devices at the location which is my Mother’s apartment.
Has anyone been able to get the Amazon Skill to successfully work with 2 different Smart Things locations?
And, yes I have tried choosing the location that is her apartment thinking maybe they got mixed up somehow. No mater which location I choose I get her devices.
Short version: At the present time you can’t have two different locations. Smartthings only exposes one location to Alexa.
There are many discussions about this already in the forum going back over a year, plus it is in the official support knowledgebase. They say they’re working on it, but they said that for awhile:
Can I control multiple SmartThings Locations or Samsung Connect Places with Alexa?
.
No, not at this time. But we are working on an update that will allow multiple Amazon Alexa devices on separate Amazon accounts to control separate SmartThings Locations or Samsung Connect Places.
edited to correct because I was wrong the first time when I said you didn’t get to pick. You do now get to pick, but apparently if you try to change it later, things can get confused. @tgauchat explains more below.
Wrong… When you link the skill to your Smartthings account you are clearly given a choice of locations. I wouldn’t be here stating “I choose to link it to the location which is my house” if I didn’t actually have that option.
They wouldn’t give us the option to choose a location, which you clearly get, if they didn’t support it.
The link I gave you is to the official support database. They are the ones who say multiple locations are not yet supported. I suggest you get in touch with them.
Edited my post above. You are right about selecting, as @Tgauchat explains below, but you can still currently only have one. Support can explain more since it seems like you would like an official answer.
True, but then how much sense does it make to include a Bluetooth radio in the hub when it has never been enabled? Or USB ports on the back which you can’t do anything with?
SmartThings’ design is unfortunately Sometimes ahead of SmartThings’ execution.
It makes more sense to include the bluetooth, so we’re not forced to go out and buy a new hub if/when they enable it, than it does to give you a choice but not really give you a choice. I’m not buying it.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
8
You DO get to choose.
The limitation is that you only get to choose one Location. All subsequently different Location authorization attempts are ignored by Amazon, and, actually can mess up the current working Location.
In the IDE under Locations / SmartApps, be sure to Uninstall the Alexa SmartApp from secondary Locations. If necessary, detached the SmartThings Skill from inside the Alexa App too.
There is nothing super complicated about supporting multiple Locations from a single vendor’s Cloud Account (ActionTiles supports unlimited number of Locations / Hubs to be connected to one or more ActionTiles Accounts!). Amazon + SmartThings just didn’t implement this correctly, or decided it would be of limited use and too likely to cause confusion.
Unfortunately, everyone above is correct…while it gives you a ‘choice’ it only works with one locations. There are ‘hacks’ around this that I created in my own situation, but they require two Alexa accounts and two SmartThings accounts.
So then question for you… In order to use your “Alexa Virtual Switch” do I need the smartthings skill installed and working for my location and my location only?
You can create virtual switches in the IDE. My app just creates them via the mobile app instead of having to go to the IDE. Not sure how you want to use them be you might have to have them at the remote location and then control them via a REST API. Is that what you mean?
tgauchat, are you saying there is a workaround for maintaining multiple ST locations?
In my situation, I had a set up working fine until I added another ST hub. Now Alexa only sees devices in the new location and nothing in the original. (Amazon support hasn’t been able to figure it out and stopped returning calls.)
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
14
No.
I’m saying that SmartThings does not have any inherent limitations for a 3rd Party service (such as ActionTiles) from connecting to multiple ST Locations concurrently, but Amazon has not implemented their Alexa-SmartThings connection properly to allow this.