After I finally beat the dongles into submission, it took a little while to discover that many of my devices did not seem to be operating, but in reality, they were just not responding to verbal commands via Alexa.

Complicating things is that I was also dealing with some WiFi trauma while settling in the new Ubiquiti gear. I was suffering a lot of disconnections and I could not be 100% sure that the WiFi devices that I was trying to control may not have just been switching on and off like a crazy monkey. Short version on that seems to have been overzealous roaming defaults with only two fairly distant APs, but that is a story for that blog.

Once the WiFi was settled down, if not solved, it was obvious that Alexa could definitely see all the devices. I could change a device name and it would be detected, but I still could not control any devices with verbal commands. There were a couple of responses but by far, the most common was that there was no <device> in my profile. Sometimes, I would get that the device was not responding. What I would never get is a device that was controlled.

The timing for this failure is abysmal. My wife just had knee surgery and in preparation for that, I made sure the lamp in the bedroom where she would be staying (she must avoid the dogs for a while) had a smart bulb in it that she could control verbally, except that verbal control wasn’t happening.

After trying no shortage of useless stuff and random restarts of various services, I was getting to be on the right track and had tried removing the skill from Alexa. In Googling about that, I stumbled across a forum posting where someone suggested removing one file and restarting home assistant. I chose instead to rename that one file, just in case. Well, praise Jack Bauer because it worked. All the Alexa stuff works again!

Well, I had to re-re-rename some things back to normal, basically clean up the messes I made troubleshooting. I’ve had to do that a lot lately.

The file in question is /config/.storage/cloud. My old one was 3 times the size of the new one that the system created automatically to replace the missing one. It had several blocks that seemed to be associated with Google devices (of which I have zero, so far as I know) but generally, it was just a bigger file with more stuff in it. I’m sure there was redundancy or perhaps one scrambled line in there.

Now that I can tell Alexa to turn on the Christmas tree and she does, of freakin’ COURSE the rotating base for the tree would stop passing power through to the lights. It is always something.