A wrote a smartapp a while back so that I could run a tasker task that triggered by door lock via an Endpoint. That way I could trigger it from my SmartWatch (pebble previously, now Android Wear).
But I built in a bit of security… instead of touching the lock itself, the Endpoint triggered a virtual tile. The app would then check to make sure my car was home. If it was, then it would unlock the door. If not, it wouldn’t.
If someone was really security conscious they could do a similar sort of thing and build in the “standard” limitations on the app: “Only during this time, only in these modes” and/or other conditions.
But yeah… I don’t see too many people worried about that right now.
And of course if you have a Prime Music account you can play that with Alexa itself. But yes, as others have said you can turn Sonos speakers on/off with Alexa/Echo.
At the present time, echo only recognizes switches and bulbs. Nothing to do with smart things, that’s true of any Home automation controller connecting to echo.
To get around that, you can use a virtual switch to stand in for the other device. So echo thinks it’s a light switch, but smartthings Will get the request to change that switch on then go ahead and do something with your other device.
The lock is fairly easy to deal with, you just make turning on the switch to be unlock and turning off the switch to be lock.
You can search the forums for associating a lock and a switch for ways to do that. Here’s a good one (this is a clickable link)
Thermostats are much more complicated because of all the different things you might want to do with them. There are a couple of community members who are using a virtual dimmer switch to represent a thermostat but it might not give you all the features you want.
Talk to the people in the following topic about the thermostat, but it may be a less defined process at this point:
Hopefully over time echo will add more device classes, so we won’t have to do these kind of workarounds. So you could also just wait for that if you like.
For information on the incompatibility between Echo and the brand-new Phillips hue 2.0 HomeKit – enabled hub.
The discovery process for the new Hue bridge has changed as far as when you press the button on the bridge. This is why echo on its own cannot discover the new Hue bridge. Amazon says they’re working on it. Phillips says Amazon need to make a software change to echo. Because a SmartThings/Hue Bridge is a custom integration rather than the standard Hue integration, it looks like that may be unaffected.
If your SmartThings hub is able to connect with your new HomeKit enabled hue bridge, you should be able to authorize the hue bulbs as SmartThings devices By using the echo app rather then the SmartThings app to do the device authorization. This is the reverse of my usual advice, which is to use the native connection to echo. But it might be the only way to make it work for now.
If you do run into a problem, report it to all three companies, Phillips, Amazon, and SmartThings.
Hopefully Amazon will get this fixed soon. But meanwhile, doing it this way should give you echo control of the bulbs via SmartThings to the bridge, plus HomeKit control of the bulbs via its direct connection to the Hue bridge.
Phillips support now says that Amazon has applied the necessary fixes to support the Hue 2.0 bridge. You need to check in your Alexa app to make sure your Echo is updated to at least 2723:
I have four WeMo switches and I am using Amazon Echo with the connected home SmartThings integration. My problem is that I set up a switch in ST app and it works fine in the Alexa app there are 8 entries that look like these two.
Front Outside Lights
SmartThings
Front Outside Lights
WeMO
Alexa will not work as there are two entries with the same name, so I click the WeMo entries and click forget for each one. But within a half hour they reappear. I haven’t been able to figure out how to prevent Alexa from creating these duplicate entries. Anyone figure out how to do this? I have contacted Amazon support and they are sending it to the Alexa developers, but now it is a real pain to say the least.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
63
This is simple… I ran into the same problem.
Here is how you fix it.
In the ST mobile app go to SmartApps
Open "Amazon Echo"
Click on “My device List” to go into the configure (this is where you choose the devices that Echo will see)
Un-check the boxes that are associated with the WeMo switches.
Click next until done.
Open your Alexa mobile App
Navigate to your connected devices list.
Click forget on all of the WeMo devices (so there are none in there)
Have Echo discover your devices. It will find the WeMo devices now, but only one instance of them.
The Problem ~ Echo is discovering the devices in both the ST environment and your WiFi environment. This is why there are multiples of each. It will not control them properly like this, you must create a group and put all of the identical ones in the group.
Perform the steps above and you’ll have no problems.
Edit:
Doing this allows you to have voice control of the WeMo devices with Alexa and you can control them via ST.
Looks like you’ve set up both the ST and the Wemo integrations in Alexa. Go into the ST Alexa SmartApp and deauthorize (uncheck) those switches, then in the Alexa settings, have her rediscover ST devices. Same thing happens to people with Hue integrations.
Not sure if you can do something similar to turn them off in the Wemo integration if you prefer. You could also just create a one bulb group in Alexa for each switch, but you’d need to use a new name.
I went into the ST app for Alexa and unchecked the four switches, but I left the ones marked Smartthings in the Alexa units app and removed the ones marked WeMO maybe Alexa won’t pick up the wemo switches again. The problem is that Alexa continues to scan every few minutes and recreates the switches. I contacted Amazon developers and they are going to look into it. I didn’t do a rescan as that will surely find the WeMo switches.
After unchecking the switches in the ST app for Alexa, you need to remove the ones marked SmartThings from Alexa. Those will not reappear because Alexa is no longer authorized to access (see) them. The Wemo ones will continue to pop up, but that’s ok because the ST versions won’t be there anymore.
What good is that as I want to use the connected home qualities of Alexa so I want to keep the Smarthings switches and not the WeMo. You are defeating the purpose of the connected home by removing the SmartThings integration.
The other option would to be to disable the Wemo integration in the Alexa settings of the mobile app, unless Wemo provides a way to authorize at the device level. Are there Wemo devices that don’t integrate into ST that you want Alexa to control?
Once devices show up on the connected home devices list, you can use Alexa to control them by voice regardless of which controller is listed with them.
You can also set up an Echo group that combines devices from different controllers, which is very useful.
removing a device from the echo authorization list in SmartThings doesn’t remove it from SmartThings itself, so you still have all the nonvoice options inside of SmartThings that you had previously regardless of who echo thinks owns it.
It’s true that sometimes one controller will offer more features than another, like the ability to dim a particular kind of lightbulb.
Is there a particular voice control feature that you’re getting from SmartThings as a listed controller that you wouldn’t get from having WeMo as the listed controller?
1 Like
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
71
If you would just follow the steps above you’d see that it works… Or, I’m sure there’s some other long winded work around that probably works too.
I have been told there will be more Elexa integrations coming soon and I wanted to stay with the ST platform. If Amazon doesn’t come up with an answer soon I will do as suggested. but for now I will keep things running as is.
I created some groups so even if WeMo is added they should still work. Yes people are having the same problem with Hue.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
73
I’m honestly having trouble understanding what you are thinking is wrong here.
If you have the boxes checked in the Amazon echo ST app for the Wemo devices Echo is going to see the Wemo on both the ST network and on your wifi network.
Wemo is wifi.
Disabling the Wemo in the ST app does not take away any of the home automation functions. The Wemo works fine with ST and with echo.
I honestly believe you are over thinking this. You’ve put in a trouble call to amazon on an issue that really is not an issue.
Plus, you come to this forum, state your problem and hope for help. You’ve been given help from people that have not only run into the issue themselves, but fully understand the way it all works together, and have figured out how to fix it.
Basically you’ve come across to this forum that we are wrong. But hey, everyone is free to have an opinion.
So, on that note, why ask for help if you’re going to ignore it? You’ve been told that it’s not an actual problem, but the way you have configured your system, and you act like we are wrong. Ok.
Basically it comes down to this, from me, if you don’t like the answer, then stop asking the question.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
74
Again, follow the directions spelled out for you by the members here. It will fix the problem you are having. There is nothing wrong with the hardware, it’s because you have it configured wrong.
