Alexa-Hue Bridge Plugin (old locked topic)

[jay (support)]

Not with this plugin since the Hue only supports on/off/brighten/dim commands.

[ckeyes888]

OT no doubt but curious if anything could developed in Indigo to control the Echo's
audio? Love to have CP controls similar to Sonos or Logitech.

Thanks,

Carl

[jay (support)]

I don't believe there's any API to control the Echo, though I haven't looked at the API recently.

[george99]

Ok this has been working great for me for a while until now.
Last week I bought 4 hue color changing bulbs and an actual hue bridge.
Everything worked, But suddenly yesterday Alexa was no longer able to control my devices that used the plugin.
I tried disconnecting the real hue bridge and then Alexa started working again. As soo. As I plugged in the bridge, Alexa stopped working.

It was working fine for several days.

Any idea how to make this work?

[george99]

Ok one more interesting tidbit.
I just realized that if I issue the same command to Alexa 3 times in a row (let her acknowledge with ok on each one),
It works .

[jay (support)]

No idea. I have a Hue hub and they are living together without issue. When you're talking to Alexa, are you trying to control an Indigo device or a Hue device? Do you have Hue devices named the same as your Indigo devices? That might be causing confusion.

[george99]

Hi,
Well they were living together for about 5 days until suddenly they stopped.
They do share a partial name of the lights.
That might be it.
I'll update and post back here.

[george99]

Wasn't it.
I have 4 hue bulbs.
I have 26 lights in indigo that use the Alexa plugin.
All 26 are having the issue. I have to respect the commands multiple times for anything to work.

I looked in the log, and nothing shows when it doesn't work. It's obvious that Alexa is trying to talk to the hue bridge instead of the plugin, but the question is why.
I set the plugin up a while back and I don't recall where I tell Alexa how to contact the plugin (if at all).

[jay (support)]

I just updated my hue hub to the latest firmware, restarted everything, told Alexa to forget everything, then rediscovered. Everything was found (both from Indigo and from the Hue Hub) and it's all working. So it doesn't appear to be something with the Hue Hub firmware. You might want to update your hub to see if that makes any difference, but I sorta doubt it.

The plugin just makes sure it's discoverable when it's running (it does it automatically when it starts up, no need to manually start/stop it). Then when you tell Alexa to discover devices, it goes out on the network, discovers all Hue Hubs (which the plugin pretends to be) and asks about devices, etc. If you turned on debug logging and you don't see anything at all when you tell the Echo to discover, then it's not seeing the plugin for some reason. Unfortunately, all the troubleshooting tips I know of are listed on this thread.

[autolog]

Just received my Amazon Echo (It's the release day in the UK) and installed the Alexa-Hue Bridge plugin.

It worked straight away

Doing the sudo lsof -i :1900 test showed that the Logitech Squeezebox Server is using those ports (shows as perl5.18 in the list).

I should add: It's a super plugin and thanks, it has a great WAF

[michaelu]

Evening- (I posted back in end of July about issues getting this setup, see my original post below)

I was able to test this on a fresh machine and it worked PERFECTLY, so it's for sure the OS X Server app...

Does anybody know what is running in the OS X Server app that kills this plugin from working? I have a dedicated MacMini that runs Indigo and also OS X server for a slew of other services, i can adjust as needed but as soon as I set up a test machine this worked instantly. Don't want another dedicated machine just for the alexa bridge.

On the OS X Server Machine when i run the command 'lsof -i :1900' i get nothing... so I'm guessing it's something with the domain/hostname.

Anybody have any tips and tricks (OTHER than removing Server?) that could help me find what is blocking it?

I must be missing something.

I've had alexa for a few weeks, i'm able to connect all my other skills etc. I have Indigo 6, long time user. I've disabled the old Hue Lights plugin but no matter what i do Alexa won't see the discovery process, it always finds the 11 Phlips devices on my network, even if i unplug the Hue bridge (v1)

I've set the discovery times from 0 - 4 minutes, i've tried starting discovery before and after i start Alexe-Hue Bridge discovery. They are both on the same LAN, but the Indigo machine is wired and the Alexa is Wifi but it's the same Airport network.

I just feel like I'm missing something obvious and hope for some help, i've setup a test device and shows up in published devices in the 'Manage Devices' Pane.

Anybody got the obvious thing I'm missing here?

Any help is appreciated!

_MichaelU

[mlooss]

I have always run Indigo from OS X server for several years (currently still on 10.11) and never had any issues at all with any plug-in. My Alexa-Hue Bridge Plugin works like a charm from day one and continues to do so.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[RogueProeliator]

Does anybody know what is running in the OS X Server app that kills this plugin from working? I have a dedicated MacMini that runs Indigo and also OS X server for a slew of other services, i can adjust as needed but as soon as I set up a test machine this worked instantly. Don't want another dedicated machine just for the alexa bridge.

It isn't likely something to do with the server app itself -- there are a ton of people on here using both. The most likely is the hostname issue; have you read through here (and maybe Jay updated the first post) with how to check if you are having issues with that?

Somewhat possible that installing the server app changed a setting related to host names in which case it may not be having the server installed directly causing the issue, but perhaps needing to fix up a setting that it triggered.

[mlooss]

I agree, domain name resolution, both forward and reverse are essential for a fully functional server. If you run Server you might as well enable DNS and configure a local zone, that is what I do.


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[michaelu]

Ok, thats gotta be it... I get no hostname errors in the plugin with all debuging enabled, i think the issue is my server app a while back hijacked my airport and 'auto-configured' it to my domain. Just looking at it now my alexia-hue plugin when loading shows my external IP as my host, i'm sure thats not helping. Most of services are now cloud based anyway, i may be stuck (but overdo) for a erase / start over of my whole mac mini server. I've had enough OS X servers to know it's not worth my time Roto-Rootering the OS X add ins, i'm down to FileShare, VPN and Time Machine, i can do that without the rest.

Sounds like it's save my database and files, backup and Mr. Robot my server. Just looking at my settings says thats my plan. Will report back when done. I'll do Indigo first before Server and document the process in case that helps anybody else.