Vera Scenes and one light

Other Devices & Integrations Voice Assistants
#1

I just got and installed an Amazon Alexa, which I set up to work with my Vera Plus. While it works for the most part, I am having two issues I’m hoping to get help with.

  1. Only one of my scenes shows up. I’m pretty sure it is due to this (from the official documentation):
Note: For security reasons, Alexa cannot unlock locks and will only support Scenes with lighting- switches and dimmers, and thermostat devices at this time.
Pretty much all my scenes involve my door locks in some way, either locking or unlocking. So how can I work around this? I was thinking of perhaps making additional scenes that simply have some lua code that calls the "real" scenes, but is there a more elegant way?
  1. I have one light that behaves oddly. I can set the brightness to whatever I want (including 100%, but not 0%), but I can’t turn it on or off. Calls for “Alexa, turn the dining room light on” or “Alexa turn the dining room light off” result in Alexa saying “OK”, but no change in the light status. For what it’s worth, this is not an Alexa specific problem - I get the same behavior with Siri through siri-homekit-bridge. Meanwhile, a second identical light, installed in the same way, works fine. How can I get Alexa (or siri, for that matter) to turn this light on and off as well as setting the brightness?

Thanks for any help, let me know if more information is needed for anything!

#2

So I just noticed with the light that turning it off from the web interface doesn’t work either, however, with Alexa (unlike Siri) I CAN set it to 0%, which of course does the same thing. So as long as I use percentages, I can control it, but not on/off. Odd.

#3

Did you try using ‘turn off dining room’ ? I notice that this works while ‘turn dining room off’ doesn’t with my setup (and my English is not very good).

For the locks I would use a virtual switch which is triggered by your voice command. The switch will then trigger the locks.

#4

Yeah, “Turn off dining room light” is my usual phrasing. The other way just feels a bit awkward to me, but that’s just me :-). Interestingly, Alexa does appear to understand the command correctly - I get a response of “ok” - it just doesn’t appear to work.

That makes sense, assuming that Alexa can “see” virtual devices created by plugins. Using a switch feels cleaner than my original thought of “dummy” scenes. I’ll have to try that and see what happens. Thanks again!

#5

Hello ibrewster,

In case you would still need assistance with this, please reply to my email.

Thank you!