Switchbot Hub Mini Integration

Devices & Integrations
1

Hi Everyone,

Sorry in advance about the longish post. Sometimes the intent of what someone is trying to do gets lost in a very narrow and specific question so I opted to be a little verbose.

Maybe I am missing something but I am having a bear of a time getting my switchbot mini to integrate correctly. I think I may even have a defective unit. I have a fairly smart home, so I am not quite a novice when it comes to automation and integrating.

This is what I have:

Alexa echo in two rooms, harmony hub, fire tv, brilliant home control (3 sliders), nest thermostat, nest protect, nest lock, blink XT2 camera, insteon hub, and 14 insteon switches/fan control and sensors (for garage) throughout the house.

If you are wondering, for the insteon devices, I had to code a couple of DHTs to be able to control them, but that is not important atm.

I can control everything in the house from alexa, the ST app, or the brilliant come control without too many problems. But the one thing I can’t do very well is to show the front camera. Alexa is able to display the camera to my fire tv, but I have not found an acceptable solution where Alexa switches my tv input to the fire tv and then displays the camera. This is because 1) In alexa, the front camera is unsupported as a device in routines and 2) I cannot just control switching to a specific input from the harmony skill. I am able to tell Alexa, something like “Turn on Fire TV and then show me the camera”. This works, but it will interrupt the current activity. I don’t want to have to restart the activity I am in simply because I want to see the camera for a few seconds. This is where I think the switchbot hub mini should help.

The idea is that I can teach the swtichbot hub the input1 and and input2 ir buttons and have Alexa, through switchbot hub integration, switch between the two inputs when I want to view the camera. Then I can tell alexa, “Turn on the camera channel and show me the camera” and “Turn off the camera channel and stop the camera”, for example.

So, I was able to teach the swtichbot hub the two inputs ir commands, but this is where everything seems to go bad. For the life of me, I cannot get the ST integration, Alexa integraton or even the Switchbot app itself on my iphone to actually fire the ir commands correctly. I am able to capture the commands and test that they work, but when I step a away from the switchbot hub, it does not fire the ir commands when I press the buttons in the app or anywhere else. I thought maybe it had something to do with iphone to hub bluetooth commands, so I turned off bluetooth on my iphone to no avail. I can see that the switchbot hub’s light turns on, but the commands do not seem to get sent (tv does not switch inputs) unless my phone is inches from the switchbot hub. This seems like a very basic thing that should work, especially directly from the switchbot app. What am I doing wrong? It seems like a lot of people in this forum have gotten this to work. Is my switchbot hub defective?

Thank you in advance!
Jose

2

I would contact Switchbot support, or if you bought the unit from amazon, just return it and get another and try that. It does sound like something is wrong with the unit. :disappointed_relieved:

3

Thank you. I will try that. I am stumped as to why the phone has to be so close. Does that even make sense?

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4

It only makes sense if the antenna inside the device is broken or there’s a power issue. But it still doesn’t really make sense technically for other reasons I just am not up to going into right now. If the device set up properly, it should be using Wi-Fi to communicate, not Bluetooth. so distance to the router might matter, but not distance to the phone.

So at the moment, all I can say is that that’s weird, it shouldn’t happen, it’s not happening for most other people, so it’s probably a defective device.

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5

As suspected, the original unit was defective. I replaced it and everything works as expected.

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