When Alexa turns on lights, how does it know if devices are online/offline?

Devices & Integrations Device Ideas
1

Hi,
I have tried using Alexa to turn on my lights, and they turn on. But when I disconnect power from my lights, and then I ask Alexa to turn on my lights, it says that the lights aren’t responding. How does it know when the lights can/can’t respond? I am curious about this.

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2

Are your lights controlled by SmartThings?

3

If you are talking about the native integration there is probably feedback from SmartThings to the app if the state changes. Which is odd, because if you ask the status of a device (again, using native integration) it will sometimes say “the device does not support that”.

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4

Yes they are.

5

Then I guess like @MichaelS says, ST provides some kind of feedback to Alexa that the device is unreachable because you disconnected the power.

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6

My devices say Active, not Online. And when I disconnect power, my devices still say Active. So I’m not sure how this works.

7

It knows because smartthings is supposed to send an acknowledgement to echo that the command was received and completed. Each time.

Sometimes you will see this work incorrectly when you tell echo to do something, echo passes the message over to SmartThings, SmartThings does it but smartthings takes too long to get the acknowledgment back to echo and echo will tell you that “smartthings is not responding” even though everything worked the way you wanted it to.

So it’s just a “call and response” format and echo is telling you the result of the response.

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