OMG! Thank-you so much for mentioning this!
My Echo has claimed to Discover my Hues try after try, and yet they never showed up in the mobile App… Except once, inexplicably. I sent support email, but they said I had to call for interactive help.
Ummm… This fixed it right away.
Now I have to try the emulator (though I also have SDK access… Guess I need to lock myself in my office for a few hours).
How pathetic is this? I literally dreamt about demoing the Echo for my cousins last night.
I use a lot of voice control: nothing under $40,000 compares to this gadget for what occupational therapists call “handsfree environmental control.”
It’s all I can do to keep from tearing out every wall switch in the house and replacing them with WeMos. But I’m still going to wait, there will be more choices coming soon.
But, man. Awesome doesn’t come close. 
In the mean time why not just install the Hue Emulator ? It works perfectly.
I am putting mine on a Rasberry Pi 2 (Arriving Today), currently running on an old notebook computer running Lubuntu.
Don’t want to get into anything that requires code maintenance.
I’m quadriparetic with limited hand control. That’s the whole reason voice control is so important to me. I have to do everything on the computer by voice. So anything to do with code is just a total pain.
Most of my personal aides and my housemate are not techie. Trying to tell someone else how to do this stuff without being able to do it hands-on is hell on earth.
I have one aide who is techie but he only comes one day every two weeks and I limit the stuff I need him to do.
So, yeah, not getting into emulators or anything like that. At this stage in my life, plug and play with a few parameter settings is the most energy I have to invest in environmental control solutions.
Just my reality. Everybody’s got their own calculation for how much time, energy, and money they want to invest in any given project. 
Hey, have you run into the “no more than 18 active devices through the Hue bridge” limit for Echo?
I’d expect that to affect some of the home automation set ups.
This hue emulator sounds awesome. Time to dig out the old Raspberry Pi that’s been gathering dust
JD… I removed all hues and family products from Echo. All 20 of them. Echo connected home was able to find all 20 of them. These are combination of hues, lux, light strips and living colors.
Excellent, maybe they’ve fixed that. Last official discussion of the limitation I saw was dated early April.
The only thing I noted was I have additional 2 GE links attached to the hue hub (making the total 22). It sort of found the 2 GE links but shows up as offline.
Once I configure an instance of the emulator for personal use, I’d be happy to assist with configuration and periodic maintenance for you, JD. You’ve deserved this convenience for above and beyond contributions here.
We could probably send you a Raspberry Pi or similar all ready for “plug-and-play” in your home.
Hee Hee, I just made the same offer privately over private message 
@JDRoberts looks like folks really appreciate your help in this community, kudos to you !
Thanks, I really appreciate it, but I’ll have to pass. I’m on an accessible technology committee which keeps me up to date on some interesting stuff but also means I’m covered by a number of developer agreements even though I’m not doing any developing. Kind of like being a beta tester but just giving use case input.
Anyway, Philips is one of the covered brands, so I can’t myself use the emulator in that way. Plus I’m more useful in the committee context if I’m only using market-available technologies.
But I really appreciate the thought. There’s going to be a ton of stuff coming for voice over the next year, I’m sure SmartThings will be in there somewhere. Very exciting!
OH forget I offered that, “These are not the droids you are looking for”
Don’t worry, I’m under no obligation to report anyone else’s uses. 
Just limited to strict interpretation for my own install.
Lets all grant JD a sainthood and the best citizen award. or may be a title of SIr! 
I’ll settle for an answer to the Big Switch question. 
Terry, be sure to let us know how that goes for you. I’ve tried running the emulator on a Windows box and on a Pi, both with limited success. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, it seems to work fine for a few commands, then Alexa starts telling me that she can’t connect to the device or group named blah-blah, and from that point on nothing works until I restart the emulator. Looking forward to hearing of your experiences.
Thanks, Terry
Ron,
I would love to hear about how your attempt to run the emulator on a Raspberry Pi goes. I agree that it is an ideal platform. If you could possibly document the steps you follow and then share with the community, that would be awesome and very much appreciated!
Dan
Sure, my raspberry just arrived so the project is starting 
I currently have it running on a notebook on ubuntu so I would expect the process to be the same.
Namely, place jar on machine and run it using JAVA 8 with correct argument to tell it the IP of your machine. But I will confirm once I have tried that.
Woo hoo! As long as both SmartThings and Echo are linked to the same Hue bridge, I can indeed use a GE link bulb on that bridge as a “man in the middle” so I have voice control over SmartThings (including mode changes) via either The Big Switch or The Big Switch for Hello Home Actions.
There’s about a 5 minute lag at my house, though, between asking Alexa and the end result, so it all depends on the use case. Works just fine for Good Night and Good Morning actions, for example, where 5 minutes ramp up is fine with me. Of course you also have to be OK with the bulb being on/off for the duration. So again, all comes down to the details of the use case.
