Alexa device discovery now broke

[smartypantsuk]

Hi,

I have been using v5.3.1RC1 for a while, everything has worked well and the 'new device overwrites old device' bug has been fixed.
Sadly, and strangely, all my Alexa devices will no longer discover new bridge devices. After much diagnosing I have determined it to be a compatibility issue, possibly caused by an Amazon device update?

Testing:
Any v5.x.x version of the bridge does not allow for discovery. The logs show search and response between Alexa device and bridge but nothing is ever found on the Alexa device.

For reference I'm using ha-bridge on Windows 10.

Thanks

[luciano968]

I think the issue resides with Amazon pushing some sort of update.

[smartypantsuk]

I think the issue resides with Amazon pushing some sort of update.

Yeah. I don't mind re-creating my devices in v4.x.x but when I use v4 I get the bug whereby I can't add new devices as it overides the older devices

[Juppers]

I just tried using 4.5.6 and devices were still not discovered.

[ggodart]

I have same problem with a completely new installation 5.3.0 and 5.3.1rc1 - never used HA-Bridge before. I thought it may be an echo problem so reset it to factory defaults before testing but devices that are correctly defined in HA-Bridge are not discovered by Alexa app.
UPnP trace shows comms between Echo and HA-Bridge and sending templates 1, 2 and 3 but Alexa App just reports No Devices found.
The guys in Misterhouse have the same problem and suspect a change at Amazon and spoke of something to do with long responses and gzip (beyond my comprehension)

[smartypantsuk]

I just tried using 4.5.6 and devices were still not discovered.

V4.x.x always worked well for me. Just had too many other bugs. Maybe it's some other issue for you. Firewall? Different subnet, port?

[ggodart]

Echo and HA-Bridge connected to same router/subnet, and I can see udp traffic between them so unlikely to be firewall.

[smartypantsuk]

I have same problem with a completely new installation 5.3.0 and 5.3.1rc1 - never used HA-Bridge before. I thought it may be an echo problem so reset it to factory defaults before testing but devices that are correctly defined in HA-Bridge are not discovered by Alexa app.
UPnP trace shows comms between Echo and HA-Bridge and sending templates 1, 2 and 3 but Alexa App just reports No Devices found.
The guys in Misterhouse have the same problem and suspect a change at Amazon and spoke of something to do with long responses and gzip (beyond my comprehension)

Did they find a fix, is there a link? There is an option to increase a timeout but perhaps not the correct thing. We could try increasing the timeout to 2000 or 3000

[ggodart]

No sign of a fix yet sadly

[smartypantsuk]

No sign of a fix yet sadly

Still, v4 works for me. How odd

[phyllox]

Hello
For me, no device can be added/updated since one week. I changed nothing between the time it was working and the time it started not working. Probably an Alexa update. Called them, but they even don'y understand my questions.
Here is what I tried, but nothing worked :

• Delelet all Alexa devices and make a new search. But Alexa re-decovered the same as before - even if deleted, renamed, even after I put HA-Bridge down, Crazy !
• Changed devices numbering in HA-Bridge with different sequences (10x, 40x, 60x etc...)
• Reset all my Alexa equipments (2xEcho, 1 spot, 1 Dot). After this and also after I also removed all rooms in Alexa, nothing was dicovered the HA-Bridge is up or down.
• Changed the HA-Bridge version. restored a previous version from an image (it is a Synology virtual machine), changed version (which was 5.2.1) to 5.3.1RC1.
• Deleted everything from HA-Bridge and recreated some test equipments.
• Tried several config options in HA-Brige.
  Nothing of all that worked. Alexa is totally ignorig my HA-Bridge devices.
  Any thought ?
  Thanks

[ggodart]

I also tried HA-Bridge 4.5.6 with a clean install, created a device but still discovery didn't work. Tried with 2 versions of echo dot and a full sized echo.
I'm pretty sure Amazon has changed the interface/protocol and nixed all third party Hue emulations.

[roadsnail]

Also seeing the same issue (adding new devices) with 5.3.1RC1

Foolishly deleted all my HA-Bridge devices from amazon smart home devices, thinking they'd all return. But nothing detected.

Tried re-installing Gen2 Dot, Gen 3 Dot and Show 8 then re-discovering. No luck.

Then I saw this post regarding V4.x.x, so installed V4.5.6 deleted all in ha-bridge/data directory, added a few dimmable lights but was still unable to add new devices. That was last night. Just for the hell of it ran another discover earlier today, and 3 lights are detected and controllable okay, and one was detected but duplicated. I think one of the duplicates might have been working but I managed to delete the wrong duplicate! Doh! Tried to add the deleted duplicate to no avail.

I then restored V5.3.1RC1 using the /data db and config files as created by 4.5.6, and my 3 working lights are controllable by Alexa. I then tried adding my previously duplicated light, (still with V5.3.1RC1) but it is still not discovered. Currently sticking with my 3 working lights until Amazon resolves this issue whenever that happens to be.

So I can confirm for the sake of smartypantsuk sanity that V4.5.6 sort of worked for me but only after leaving things for about 12 hours before performing a re-discovery. (Some sort of caching thing at the Amazon Alexa device back-end?)

[smartypantsuk]

Also seeing the same issue (adding new devices) with 5.3.1RC1

Foolishly deleted all my HA-Bridge devices from amazon smart home devices, thinking they'd all return. But nothing detected.

Tried re-installing Gen2 Dot, Gen 3 Dot and Show 8 then re-discovering. No luck.

Then I saw this post regarding V4.x.x, so installed V4.5.6 deleted all in ha-bridge/data directory, added a few dimmable lights but was still unable to add new devices. That was last night. Just for the hell of it ran another discover earlier today, and 3 lights are detected and controllable okay, and one was detected but duplicated. I think one of the duplicates might have been working but I managed to delete the wrong duplicate! Doh! Tried to add the deleted duplicate to no avail.

I then restored V5.3.1RC1 using the /data db and config files as created by 4.5.6, and my 3 working lights are controllable by Alexa. I then tried adding my previously duplicated light, (still with V5.3.1RC1) but it is still not discovered. Currently sticking with my 3 working lights until Amazon resolves this issue whenever that happens to be.

So I can confirm for the sake of smartypantsuk sanity that V4.5.6 sort of worked for me but only after leaving things for about 12 hours before performing a re-discovery. (Some sort of caching thing at the Amazon Alexa device back-end?)

The funny thing was i tried v5.3.1.RC1 again last night and it found 2 new devices. Then it wouldn't find anything else after that.

However, you could be right about the caching issue because one of the devices that it found did not exist in the HA-bridge database. It was a test device that I created but then deleted probably a few hours previous. So where did this ghost device come from if not some cache.

[roadsnail]

@smartypantsuk - Re. caching... With regard to my duplicate light I mentioned above, I'm guessing one of them was discovered earlier (under 4.5.6) the other (which did not work from Alexa voice or the Alexa Android App) must be lurking in the cloud somewhere. I definitely reset all of my devices, which presumably clears any on-device stuff? Who knows?

It's interesting that Alexa discover via 5.3.1RC1 managed to pick up any devices. I have had zero success.

[ggodart]

The guys over at Misterhouse think Amazon have changed the protocol to not use gzip in the header requests during discovery. They are going to do some more testing. It seems devices already discovered may continue to work, but once deleted you can only discover them again if they are in a cache somewhere. I think this is going to need someone from HA-Bridge to snoop the network with a real Hue device to see what should be going on and then patch HA-Bridge accordingly, I don't see Amazon helping here unless they cannot discover real Hue devices themselves now.