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Discovering WeMo switches?

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Kelleytoons

Discovering WeMo switches?
« on: May 14, 2015, 03:48:46 pm »
Supposedly you can say "Discover my Appliances" and Alexa will find Phillips Hue and WeMo switches, except she doesn't for me.  Anyone have any clues as to what to do? 

I just updated my WeMo to the latest OS, so it's not that.  The switch works fine with my network and my phone app, just can't be found by Alexa.

(BTW, really don't need confirmation for posts here -- if you can register you are a human and thus can't auto post things).

Offline jwlv

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Re: Discovering WeMo switches?
« Reply #1 on: May 14, 2015, 10:13:57 pm »
When setting up home automation with Amazon Echo, all of your devices and your Amazon Echo must be on the same network. In my house, I have two Wifi networks; One that I use mainly for security cameras and Netflix (Roku & Smart TV), and the other for Amazon Echo, Wemo, computers, iPad, and cell phones.

Assuming that your Wemo/Hue is already set up and you can control it with your phone at home and away from home, then to set it up with Amazon Echo is easy. Just start the Amazon Echo app from your phone, tap the menu button, go to Settings, and then Home Automation. If there is something already there and it doesn't work, select Forget Settings. Then tap Add Devices. If you are using Hue, then you must press the button on the Hue bridge to start discovery.

There might be another issue that isn't the fault of Wemo/Hue or Amazon Echo. The reason why I have two WiFi networks is because occasionally a device drops off the network. This could be a Wemo switch, one of my security cameras, the Echo, or any other WiFi connected device. I'm not sure why it happens, although I have a theory. I think I might have too many devices than the WiFi router can handle. Even though the router is set up to 180 DHCP IP addresses, I've found that devices start to drop off randomly after about 15 or 20 devices. If I reboot the router, everything comes back just fine. Or if I restart the particular device, then that device comes back as well. On any ordinary day, the Echo can control any of my Wemo switches. After a day or two, Echo might start saying "I cannot find the device named xxxxxxx."  But Echo can still turn on/off other Wemo switches, even though it cannot find that one particular device that dropped off. Now that I have two separate WiFi networks on two separate routers, everything has been working fine with nothing dropping off. I set the first router to channel 11 and the second router to channel 6 so that they don't overlap frequencies.


You'd be surprised at the number of automated accounts and spam messages that this forum gets daily. I have to manually ban and delete hundreds of accounts each month. Sophisticated captchas can be defeated with even more sophisticated optical recognition software. I can recognize them by where their IP address originates from and their host name (usually it's a proxy). And I can reasonably detect them just by the choice of their user name.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2015, 10:26:33 pm by jwlv »