Hi all, I’ve just bought a Hub 2.0 to link with my other devices around the house.
After 6 hours of playing with it, I can’t help but feel extremely deflated to the point where I might just cut my losses and return it to Amazon.
Here’s a rundown of my devices:
3 Alexas
Philips Hue Hub 1.0 (with 8 associated lights)
Logitech Harmony Hub with about 10 activities
4 TP Link HS100 WiFi plugs
These all currently work seamlessly together.
I’ve just bought:
SmartThings Hub 2.0
A few Xiaomi sensors (door/window and presence)
Questions
After installing the hub, updating the firmware and connecting to the app, I frequently get this error as I move through the different tabs. I haven’t even installed any devices!! Why would it be doing this? I can close it and carry on, but it’s just crazy - even before I’ve started using the thing, it’s just a bad sign to me.
I’m a bit confused about the setup of the devices. To start I added the Hue Hub, which added all the Hue bulbs. I then connected it with Alexa and ended up with duplicates of ALL the lights. So much so Alexa could no longer operate because of the duplicates. Is it best to link the bulbs with Alexa via Hue only, and therefore ensure the bulbs aren’t reimported with the ST skill (ie only the scenes instead)? The only advantage I see of ST is I can say colours whereas I can’t with the Philips as I only have a Gen 1 hub. If so, do I unlink the Hue connection with Alexa and allow ST to control it? I guess my apprehension there is the chain of command and lag. i.e Voice->Alexa->ST->Hue->Bulb seems like an awfully long chain. What do other people do?
By linking the Harmony Hub both with Alexa AND ST, again I have duplicate entries in Alexa.
I’m a complete tech savage, and I love all this stuff, but I can’t quite get my head around it all. Thanks all
I link SmartThings to Alexa, but manually deselect the Harmony activities so I dont get duplicates. This way I can link the Harmony skill and use play, pause, volume up, etc via Alexa.
You haven’t had to use the Harmony invocation for a while. I believe when they added fire tv controls they also opened up play/pause/volume etc to native commands for skills.
Thanks, the “tell Harmony” business was dropped in the UK about 5 days ago (pretty awesome). Re the chain of command, is it likely to be any slower than going directly from Alexa->Logitech? ie Alexa->ST->Logitech?
Also the Logitech Skill allows me to create a series of Hot Words for each activity. Ie my Playstation can have mulitple trigger words such as “PS4”, “Playstation” etc. Can I do that in ST?
And I’ll give Samsung a nudge on that annoying error. It happens on my Tablet too. Both are Samsung devices! Maybe it’s account related? I’ve emailed them using the address you provided, so thanks
Sorry I know I’m being stupid, so basically you’re saying that although you import ST into Alexa, you’re still using the Logitech Alexa skill to operate your devices?
Here we go. Go to the Amazon Alexa smartapp inside the SmartThings app. Turn off adding all devices/routines. Manually select them but don’t addthe Harmony ones.
If youve already added them via ST, you lol have to go to the website version of Alexa to delete them. For some reason they removed that from the mobile app.
