Emulated Hue
Be aware that emulated_hue
doesn’t work for new users of Google Home with emulated_hue
. If you’ve not previously set this up and had it working, use the Google Assistant integration or Nabu Casa cloud integration.
The emulated_hue
integrationIntegrations connect and integrate Home Assistant with your devices, services, and more. [Learn more] provides a virtual Philips Hue
A physical Hue Bridge is required for Philips Hue lights to function - this virtual bridge will not replace a physical bridge. Instead, it allows Home Assistant to represent non-Philips Hue devices to Amazon Echo as Philips Hue devices, which Amazon Echo can control with built-in support.
It is recommended to assign a static IP address to the computer running Home Assistant. This is because the Amazon Echo discovers devices by IP addresses, and if the IP changes, the Echo won’t be able to control it. This is easiest done from your router, see your router’s manual for details.
Both Google Home and Alexa use the device they were initially set up with for communication with emulated_hue
. In other words: if you remove/replace this device you will also break emulated_hue
. To recover your emulated_hue
functionality, backup your config/.storage/emulated_hue.ids
file, delete the original one and reboot your Home Assistant instance.
If you added or upgraded to a newer Alexa device and devices are not found, you must change to listen_port: 80. If Alexa responds with “value is out of range for device…” it means switches were automatically added as lights in discovery. Remove each device in the Alexa app. Turn on all the switches in Home Assistant. In the Alexa app go to “Add New Device” select “Switch” and then “other” to add them correctly.
Sleep Cycle
Logitech Harmony remotes cannot connect to this emulator via Android and iOS mobile applications because they require the physical button on the hub to be pressed. The MyHarmony desktop software
Configuration
To enable the emulated Hue bridge, add one of the following configs to your configuration.yaml
The configuration.yaml file is the main configuration file for Home Assistant. It lists the integrations to be loaded and their specific configurations. In some cases, the configuration needs to be edited manually directly in the configuration.yaml file. Most integrations can be configured in the UI. [Learn more] file.
After changing the configuration.yaml
The configuration.yaml file is the main configuration file for Home Assistant. It lists the integrations to be loaded and their specific configurations. In some cases, the configuration needs to be edited manually directly in the configuration.yaml file. Most integrations can be configured in the UI. [Learn more] file, restart Home Assistant to apply the changes.
# Google Home example configuration.yaml entry
emulated_hue:
listen_port: 80
# Google Home does not work on different ports.
# Amazon Echo example configuration.yaml entry
emulated_hue:
listen_port: 80
# Amazon Echo/Alexa stopped working on different ports. Search for "Philips Hue Bridge V1 (round)" in the Alexa App to discover devices.
Configuration Variables
The type of assistant which we are emulating. Either alexa
or google_home
. This configuration option is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. It is no longer necessary to define type.
The IP address that your Home Assistant installation is running on. If you do not specify this option, the integration will attempt to determine the IP address on its own.
The port the Hue bridge API web server will run on. This can be any free port on your system. However, all new Alexa devices require listen_port: 80. See setcap
note below if this is set below 1024
when Home Assistant is ran as a non-root user.
If you need to override the IP address used for UPnP discovery. (For example, using network isolation in Docker)
Whether or not to bind the UPnP (SSDP) listener to the multicast address (239.255.255.250) or instead to the (unicast) host_ip address specified above (or automatically determined). In special circumstances, like running in a FreeBSD or FreeNAS jail, you may need to disable this.
The domains that maps an “off” command to an “on” command. For example, if script
is included in the list, and you ask Alexa to “turn off the water plants script,” the command will be handled as if you asked her to turn on the script.
Whether or not entities should be exposed via the bridge by default instead of explicitly (see the ‘emulated_hue’ customization below). Warning: If you have a lot of devices (more than 49 total across all exposed domains), you should be careful with this option. Exposing more devices than Alexa supports can result in it not seeing any of them. If you are having trouble getting any devices to show up, try disabling this, and explicitly exposing just a few devices at a time to see if that fixes it.
The domains that are exposed by default if expose_by_default
is set to true.
[“switch”, “light”, “group”, “input_boolean”, “media_player”, “fan”, “humidifier”]
A full configuration sample looks like the one below. Configuration entries are added to the configuration.yaml
The configuration.yaml file is the main configuration file for Home Assistant. It lists the integrations to be loaded and their specific configurations. In some cases, the configuration needs to be edited manually directly in the configuration.yaml file. Most integrations can be configured in the UI. [Learn more] file.
# Example configuration.yaml entry
emulated_hue:
host_ip: 192.168.1.186
listen_port: 8300
advertise_ip: 10.0.0.10
advertise_port: 8080
off_maps_to_on_domains:
- script
- scene
expose_by_default: true
exposed_domains:
- light
entities:
light.bedroom_light:
name: "Bedside Lamp"
light.ceiling_lights:
hidden: true
The following are attributes that can be applied in the entities
section:
- name (Optional): The name that the emulated Hue will use. The default for this is the entity’s friendly name.
-
hidden (Optional): Whether or not the emulated Hue bridge should expose the entity. Adding
hidden: false
will expose the entity to Alexa. The default value for this attribute is controlled by theexpose_by_default
option.
These attributes used to be found under the customize
section of homeassistant
, however, they have now been moved to entities
. Emulated Hue configuration under homeassistant.customize
will be deprecated in the near future.
Troubleshooting
You can verify that the emulated_hue
integration has been loaded and is responding by pointing a local browser to the following URL:
-
http://<HA IP Address>:80/description.xml
- This URL should return a descriptor file in the form of an XML file. -
http://<HA IP Address>:80/api/v2/lights
- This will return a list of devices, lights, scenes, groups, etc.. thatemulated_hue
is exposing to Alexa.
Verify that the URLs above are using port 80, rather than port 8300 (i.e., http://<HA IP Address>:80/description.xml
). Both Google Home and Amazon Alexa/Echo (as of the 2019-08 firmware) require port 80.
Platform specific instructions
Home Assistant Core
An additional step is required to run Home Assistant as a non-root user and use port 80.
Linux
On Linux systems (Ubuntu, Debian, etc) execute the following command to allow emulated_hue
to use port 80 as a non-root user:
sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' /srv/homeassistant/homeassistant_venv/bin/python3
Please note that your path may be different depending on your installation method. For example, if you followed the Virtualenv instructions, your path will be /srv/homeassistant/bin/python3
.
License
Much of this code is based on work done by Bruce Locke on his ha-local-echo