Alexa cannot discover devices which used to work.

[shawn-lindberg]

I apologize if this should have been a reply to another issue, but I have been reading quite a few threads on discovery issues and none of them seem to explain what is happening.

I had been using HA Bridge for quite a few years, most recently version 5.3, with a couple of devices on a Raspberry Pi 3 B. The day before yesterday, Alexa on my Echo Dot started reporting that the devices were not responding. I started digging into this, and confirmed that the devices still responded through the HA Bridge web interface. So, I deleted the devices from the Alexa app and tried to rediscover them. Initially, it looked like this wasn't working because because of a warning about the UPNP IP address about matching a known address on the host, but I was able to fix that by removing a Wi-Fi dongle from the Pi that I didn't need anyway, and resetting the hostname. I also upgraded the bridge to version 5.4. However, the discovery will still not work.

I believe I have tried everything in the troubleshooting page at least once. In particular, I have verified that my Netgear Nighthawk X6 router has UPNP enabled, and the bridge is using a static IP. The logs are interesting. In this case, the Pi running the bridge is IP address 192.168.1.110, the Echo is .14, and my Synology NAS is .12. You can see that the Echo does request a list of the lights, but I don't see a response.
habridgelog.txt

EDIT: One other little tidbit that I forgot to add. My friend was over trying to help me with this issue yesterday and he tried to see if we could discover the devices with the Anymote app on his cell phone connected to my network. He was able to, but I wasn't able to do that later.

Any help would be most appreciated.

[shawn-lindberg]

I just tried the Anymote app again, and it was able to discover devices and turn them on and off. Here is the relevant portion of the log:
habridgeanymotelog.txt

[bwssytems]

So, if the Alexa asked for the list of lights, this will be an issue of IDs cached by amazon. Did you renumber your devices with a different seed?

[shawn-lindberg]

Yes, I re-numbered the devices using seeds of 200, 300, 400, and 500 (originally the seed was 100). I also went into my Alexa device history and deleted the device history.

[Shadow27374]

I probably have the same problem.

A few days ago I had to install HA-Bridge 5.4.0 and reallocate the IDs (100,200,etc.).
After that I still had duplicate and triplicate entries. I had to remove each device individually in Alexa. Removing them all at once does not delete them from Alexa and they would be found again.

Finally, again assign new IDs and Alexa had all my devices once.

About two days later, Alexa independently searched for new devices at night. I saw that because I had seen in the morning a notification under Android the found devices.
But since I was asleep, this is not possible...

In the AlexaApp were then again all possible devices double and triple.

From now on I can do what I want it will only Hue lamps that are integrated via the HA bridge found. All other devices via HA-Bridge are no longer found even with new IDs.

[mjrgh]

Same thing happened to me a few days ago. I didn't make any changes in my local setup at all, so my guess is that Amazon pushed an Alexa update that broke compatibility. In the morning this happened, I had a big pile of notifications from the Alexa App on my iPad saying that it had discovered many of my devices again, and as others experienced, I had duplicates of most devices in my device list in the app. The last time this happened a few months ago, the solution was to forget all the devices on the Alexa side, renumber them in ha-bridge, and go through Alexa discovery again. No luck with that approach this time. Alexa is discovering a random subset of the devices on each attempt (and it's really irritating because it keeps adding duplicates each time it does), but none of them work. In some cases, Alexa just won't find them, and in other cases, it'll find them, but it can't reach them with commands: on commands, it'll spin for about 30 seconds and finally time out with "X is not responding, please check its network connection and power supply". Nothing I've tried so far makes any difference.

[Shadow27374]

Alexa is discovering a random subset of the devices on each attempt (and it's really irritating because it keeps adding duplicates each time it does), but none of them work.

Unfortunately, you have to delete the devices in Alexa individually. The button to delete all does not work properly, then they come back again and again.

And yes, something must have happened at Amazon last night.
Now all my scripts don't work anymore. -.-

[Shadow27374]

One more small note. If I include real Hue lamps from Philips via the HA-Bridge and do not use the Hue Skill, they are still found by Alexa.

The current problem seems to affect only simulated Hues.

[shawn-lindberg]

Interesting that other people have experienced this problem or something like it as well. It does make me wonder if it is related to an update Amazon pushed out. But all of my other real physical devices to work, only to fake devices seem to be having problems.

[mjrgh]

It does make me wonder if it is related to an update Amazon pushed out.

There's nothing to wonder about - that's all but certain, based on my setup. Everything else I run is local and manually configured, and I haven't changed anything in a long time. (In fact, the last time I changed anything was the last time this happened, which was also caused by an Alexa update that Amazon pushed out.) The only thing in my system that can be screwed up by remote control is Alexa. The problem spontaneously appeared one morning, coinciding with a bunch of Alexa App notifications about newly discovering all of my devices. The most plausible explanation by far is an Alexa update.

[shawn-lindberg]

Yeah, I am agreeing with you. The fact that real physical devices are still working maybe exposes a weakness in the emulation, though?

[beandi]

I faced the same problem yesterday - after some searching i found another thread, where a solution was described:
The last digits of the unique-IDs have to be the same, so if your device has an unique id of 00:27:18:5E:E3:0D-7E, you have to change it to 00:27:18:5E:E3:0D-0D.
This change has to be done directly in the device.db-file. After that, every device was found without any problem.

[Shadow27374]

I faced the same problem yesterday - after some searching i found another thread, where a solution was described:
The last digits of the unique-IDs have to be the same, so if your device has an unique id of 00:27:18:5E:E3:0D-7E, you have to change it to 00:27:18:5E:E3:0D-0D.
This change has to be done directly in the device.db-file. After that, every device was found without any problem.

I just tried that now and it does not work.

All My devices now have these 2 values identical after the MAC address.

[beandi]

I just tried that now and it does not work.

Strange - I also removed the "copy"-text from mapid AND enabled the link-button, but the one change which definitely led to success was the edit of the unique IDs. I stopped the service during the edit, have you re-initialized the bridge?

[Shadow27374]

Yes, I have reinitialized. I turned off the HA bridge with systemctl, edited the devices.db via nano and restarted the HA bridge.

I still have a defective Fibaro switch where the relay is defective and only the ZWave part works. Thus, I can find and address my defective switch from Alexa via the official Fibaro Skill.

The switch only triggers a LUA script which sends an HTTP request to switch my fake device (air conditioner).

This is total overkill (50€ each) but at least I can now switch myA/C on and off. :D