Take advantage of Alexa Smart Home Groups

[technicalpickles]

Smart Home Device Group shipped pretty quietly, but have some awesome features:

When you add your smart home devices to a group, you can control them with simple commands like “Turn on [group name]."

When you add an Echo device to a smart home group, Alexa can act intelligently on your request. For example, just say, "Lights on," when standing in the room that corresponds to your smart home group, to control the devices in that group.

There seem to be some limitations to getting this going. You can't have any devices named for a group you want to create, and logically you want groups to be named after groups.

That means making sure each device, including Echos, Echo Dots, Ecobee, Ecobee sensors, Hue lights, all have names that include what their device is. It's unclear yet if you can rename in Alexa to get around this. Example:

• Kitchen:
  • Kitchen Sonos
  • Kitchen Echo
• Media Room
  • Media Room Lights
  • Media Room Echo Dot

https://github.com/technicalpickles/picklehome/issues/8 was partially motivated for this.

[technicalpickles]

It's unclear yet if you can rename in Alexa to get around this

This does work, was able to rename Media Room to Media Room Lights, then create Media Room group.

I added just the Media Room Lights, not the individual lights. If I did that, turning on/off would send a series of commands, rather than one. I added the auto-generated scenes from Hue to this also.

The Harmony Skill makes the activities show up as scenes, so I'm not sure how it would handle turning off the room.

[technicalpickles]

I've swapped out Echos for Sonos Ones in the Nursery and Kitchen. Unfortunately, they don't support all the cool smart home features (yet?) like "turn off lights". More specifically, they show up in Alexa Smart Home as a speaker, rather than an Echo device, so Alexa doesn't know it's an Alexa-enabled smart group.

[technicalpickles]

This has been setup for the most part.