echo- plugin and Echo Dot (3. Generation)

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Hi,
is the echo-plugin kompatible with the new echo dot - 3. gen. ?

By.

Hi,
my fast way to ALEXA is with extra PI B+ and ioBroker (Pimatic- Adapter + Cloud- Adapter) and skill for the 433MHz Devices. The Raspbeegateway and the Sonoff(Tasmota) are without skill kompatible to ALEXA.

MfG.

No, currently the only solution is to have an “older” echo like echo dot 2nd gen that is able to discover your devices. It seems that Amazon is moving away from local device discovery to cloud-based (or skill-based) solutions. I’m still planning to create a pimatic skill someday (I hope I find the time to work on this these days more often)

i use ha-bridge and some bash scripts to connect alexa with pimatic.

@michbeck100 Hi, does this mean, i can have a newer Echo Version and this will still work, if i discover the device with a dot gen.2 before? And will i need the dot 2.gen active after the discovery?

@tees Nowadays after the latest release you shouldn’t need a dot 2nd gen anymore. that’s because the “API” was changed by Amazon so I was coerced to update the plugin. But now it supports also the new echo versions. Would be great if you could verify this and let us know. Just unplug your dot 2nd gen and try to search for new devices. Might help to remove some existing devices from amazon before or create a new device in pimatic before .

@michbeck100 great and thanks for the quick replay. I odered a Echo Dot Gen 3. now during the Black Friday Week and will report when i get it delivered.

I have a 3rd gen Dot here. A was playing with it a little bit. I can confirm it works!

BTW: Is there a special reason why the plugin does not provide the echo additional config to shell devices like shell switches, shutters aso.? Would be really nice to get this. I am currently thinking to move completely back from Google Home to Echo …

@ortin please see the Readme for the supported devices. Actually some shutters are supported, as long as they extend from ShutterController. But you will have to “switch” or “dim” the shutter to move it, because that’s the only commands alexa supports for this protocol.

PS: here you can find the actual list of supported devices: https://github.com/michbeck100/pimatic-echo/blob/master/lib/hue.coffee

@michbeck100 Does this mean, i can delete my Alexa Rules, with a dummy switch, that has Echo Name, and triggers the Real Switch?

@tees I would say yes, but as I don’t know which types you actually use, I’m not sure. From the sources of pimatic-shell-execute I would say that ShellSwitch should work OOB with pimatic-echo as it extends from env.devices.PowerSwitch. Just try it, and let us know.

@michbeck100 Hi, i am trying some hours, but i don´t understand the behavior.
I give a device a echo name and activate it for echo, after that i think i had to restart pimatic, then i can discover devices and search in alexa webfrontend for new devices.
After that, sometimes the device is showing up in alexa, but does not react. Sometimes it reactes after some minutes.
But the strangest thing is, that some devices did not show up in alexa and some device switch the wrong devices. When i say switch floorlight, it switches the kitchenlight for example. And i have to discover many times to get a device working at all.

Can someone give me a hint, with a best practice?
And should i only use echo dot gen 2 or gen 3 or does this play no role which version is on or both?
And a nother question, does alexa somewhere store the recent devices? I can delete all devices, but when i discover, alexa founds devices which no longer exist whith this name.

Kind regards

@tees If everything is messed up, I would suggest shutdown pimatic, then remove the devices from Alexa. It seems you must remove one by one. Removing all devices at once didn’t work for me. Then delete the echo-database folder from your pimatic root. Now restart pimatic and do the discovery again. So Devices -> Discover devices and then let Alexa search for new devices. you got 20 seconds for this!

@michbeck100 I tried nearly everything and all you mentioned. I stopped deconz service, pimatic service, disconneted my echo dot 2. gen and deleted every device in webbrowser alexa page and in the android app, multipletimes one by one. I disonnected the raspberry and the echo dot gen 3 and alexa still found devices. When i switched some devices, it switches a nother device with but never the correct one.

After i disconnected dot gen 3 and only activate dot gen 2 alexa found no devices. Then i started pimatic and the discovery found the correct devices and switches the correct ones. So maybe it does not work with dot gen 3 correctly.

@tees I’m starting to see these issues since yesterday, too. at least I can start to investigate now. I’m also having issues with german umlauts in my device names now. See https://github.com/bwssytems/ha-bridge/issues/1151. If anyone has hints how to solve this, please let me know.

Not a sollution, but you can rename the devices in the alexa-app back to to “äüö”.

I might have nailed the problem: https://github.com/michbeck100/pimatic-echo/issues/72

I’ve released version 0.5.5 but it doesn’t show up in the updates page, yet. Maybe it’s just refreshed once a day?

The pimatic plugin pages are not updated since some time. It happened before and @mwittig restarted a deamon thats doing the update. That should be done again (and of course solve the problem).
When you go to the update pages an installed plugin will get notice that it can be updated. Because that update page is querying npm directly.

@bertreb Could also be that it’s because I didn’t push my changes, yet. But thanks for the hint.