I’m facing an almost impossible situation with my devices. Started off simple enough. Wanted to turn on my garden lights when I opened my driveway gate. The gate is controlled by a lift master MyQ by Chamberlain, and they have pulled back all third party integrations and have gone proprietary except for partners that pay their integration fee (LG & Honda). So I bought a Ring Outdoor Contact sensor, but couldn’t add it to the Ring app or Alexa because they want you to buy their alarm station. I bought it because it was the only one that indicated that it was for outdoor. Enter Homey and a developer app that was able to connect to it. However, my garden is a combination of 120V Lutron Caseta controlled lighting and Ring Transformer 12V lighting. The Ring Transformer does not integrate with Homey.
Thought that once I enabled the integration between Alexa and Homey, the Ring sensor would show up in Alexa and could be used in flows. It shows up, but it does not appear to publish any events that could be built into an Alexa routine to turn on the lights. Enter a TP-Link outlet, which is visible to both systems. The Ring Sensor starts a flow in Homey which turns on the TP-Link outlet. The fact that the TP Link outlet is turned on is detected by Alexa which starts a routine to turn on the garden lights. It’s a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine , but it works. The TP-Link outlet performs no function in this scheme except as a bridge.
It would be nice if Homey would improve their integration with Alexa to include events from all the devices that it exports to Alexa. Other applications, such as the TP-Link integration does this.
Absent this, it would be great if Homey would allow us to build phantom devices that could be used as a virtual bridge. in this way, the ring device flow would signal the virtual bridge which Alexa could pick up on and execute routines on.
