I went through the transition from the old Alexa skill to the new one. I decided to migrate to the new Smartthings app as well because the deadline on that was also closing in (I believe it’s October 14th).
I am terribly upset being forced to spend precious time during the weekend tinkering with something that was working perfectly fine until now. It’s not just about the wasted time. It’s the wasted time and the fact that I am worse off now than I was before the upgrade.
Indeed, following the advice on this forum, I was able to go through both transitions. I must admit, I had no hiccups on the way, just the deleting (disabling) of duplicates created by Smartthings in the Alexa app and the updating of Alexa routines was time consuming.
However, I ended up with the following issue that I hope you will look into: I have motorized shutters (blinds) connected to Smartthings with Fibaro Roller Shutter 3 (FGR-223). I named the individual Fibaro Roller Shutters ‘Number 1’, ‘Number 2’, etc. in both the Smartthings app and in the Alexa app. Before the upgrade I was able to group any number of the Fibaro Roller Shuters in the Alexa app. For instance, the Alexa group ‘Bed Room Shutters’ has the devices ‘Number 1’ and ‘Number 2’. I was able to tell Alexa to set Bed Room Shutters to any percentage or to turn it on or off just fine . On a side note, but still relevant to this, to make the Alexa commands more natural I created routines containing the words ‘open/close’).
After the upgrades, Alexa cannot control shutters grouped like this at all. Neither the percentage nor the on/off commands work. Only the percentage command for the individual devices works. Alexa sees them as shutters which might explain why the on/off command doesn’t work and I am able to say ‘Alexa, close Number 1’ but the shutter closes only by 1%.
I was able to regain the on/off functionality only because I use Alexa routines. Before, the routine ‘Alexa, open Bed Room Shutters’ would simply turn on the group Bed Room Shutters which contained Number 1 and Number 2 Shutters. As the on/off command is now unavailable, I changed the routine to set Number 1 and Number 2 to 100%.
Obviously, I could create routines for percentage increments but that would be a tremendous task as I have quite a few rooms each with a few shutters. Besides who knows how would Alexa take it.
As a note, if I add Number 1 and Number 2 to the Alexa group ‘Bed Room’ (not the group Bed Room Shutters) which has an echo device assigned to it, it does not see the devices as shutters / blinds and the command ‘Alexa, open/close the blinds/shutters’ does not work.
Please look into this. It’s very bad to have features taken away from customers like this. I understand that it’s not an official device handler for the FGR-223 but please do not blow me away on that account, as it worked perfectly fine until now, and all appears to be fine in the new Smarttthings app as well, there are open/close and percentage options. It’s definitely an issue of how Alexa ‘sees’ the shutters added through Smartthings. This is the thread used to set up the shutters last year:
Thank you.