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Fibaro Skills Unavailable in Australia Despite Alexa Being Released


Dennisk

Question

Hi

I moved my Amazon hardware to Australia now that it is supported here. When I went to install the two Fibaro Skills it said that they are unavailable for Australia. 

That just doesn't make any sense unless I'm missing something. 

Fibaro, surely the skills should just be dependant on where Amazon decide to support Alexa products? 

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Guest fat

That's exactly why I haven't moved mine from the US to AU just yet. I don't care about the Fibaro skill because I gave up on it because it was too slow and now run HA Bridge but worried about other skills not working

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  • It still doesn't let Fibaro off the hook. A response from them would go along way rather than ignoring a large user base in Australia.

     

    Why on earth should a skill set be geographic based for a home controller that is already sold into the region?

     

    Beats me.

     

    Fibaro? The courest of a reply would be much appreciated.

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    Posted elsewhere, but so you know, this is the latest advice from Amazon (basically change tot he US store):

    I would like to inform to you that, unfortunately we are currently not supporting FIBARO Skill on Amazon Australia Marketplace, I will forward your feedback to the concerned department so that we can work with FIBARO and make this skill available for Echo device in Australia.

     

    In this case, as an alternative until the skill is launched, you can switch your marketplace to Amazon.com and continue using this skill.

     

    Here are the steps to switch your marketplace to Amazon.com:

     

    1. Visit the Manage Your Content and Devices page on Amazon.com.au (

    Please login or register to see this link.

    )

     

    2. Select the Settings tab.

     

    3. Under the ‘Current Country’ of Country Settings heading, There will be a text stating "You are currently linked to shop on Amazon.com.au. Click here to learn more about other Amazon sites you are eligible to shop on based on your country of residence.".

     

    4. Select the "here" link to see the available options.

     

    5. Click the "Learn about transferring your Kindle account to Amazon.com" link.

     

    6. Select the "Transfer your Kindle account to Amazon.com" button and follow the on-screen instructions.

     

    Now please deregister and register your Echo device.

     

    Use the Alexa app to deregister your device:

     

    1. From the Menu, select "Settings."

    2. Select your device, and then scroll down and select "Deregister."

    3. In the message that appears, select "Deregister" again.

     

    You can also deregister your device from the Manage Your Content and Devices page:

     

    (

    Please login or register to see this link.

    )

     

    Register your device:

     

    1. Press and hold the Microphone off and Volume down buttons at the same time until the light ring turns orange (about 20 seconds). Then the light ring turns blue.

    2. Wait for the light ring to turn off and on again. The light ring then turns orange again, and your Echo device enters setup mode.

    3. Open the Alexa app to connect your device to a Wi-Fi network and register it to your Amazon account.

     

    Note: Make sure that you select English (US) when you are registering the device again.

     

    I apologize for the delay and inconvenience caused to you in this regard.

    On 2/7/2018 at 4:53 PM, Dennisk said:

    It still doesn't let Fibaro off the hook. A response from them would go along way rather than ignoring a large user base in Australia.

     

    Why on earth should a skill set be geographic based for a home controller that is already sold into the region?

     

    Beats me.

     

    Fibaro? The courest of a reply would be much appreciated.

    It's how Amazon runs their websites, not Fibaro

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  • Inquirer
  • Thanks very much for the suggestion. I will give it a go and look forward to seeing Fibaro SKills being published by Amazon locally ASAP.

     

    Cheers

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    I just bought an Amazon Echo specifically for its Fibaro support, which I expected to be available in all regions. If I switch my account to the US store just to get the Fibaro skill I will presumably lose access to Amazon's Australia store and quite possibly lose access to Alexa skills specific to Australia. This makes no sense, given that my Fibaro is built for and sold to the Australian market.

    So who is responsible for the lack of the Fibaro skill in Australia - Amazon or Fibaro?

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    1 hour ago, oztourer said:

    I just bought an Amazon Echo specifically for its Fibaro support, which I expected to be available in all regions. If I switch my account to the US store just to get the Fibaro skill I will presumably lose access to Amazon's Australia store and quite possibly lose access to Alexa skills specific to Australia. This makes no sense, given that my Fibaro is built for and sold to the Australian market.

    So who is responsible for the lack of the Fibaro skill in Australia - Amazon or Fibaro?

     

    Save some disappointment and grab your self an Automationbridge. Australian made and will solve your problem :)

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    Guest fat

    While I haven't tried the Skaro Automation Bridge so I can't comment on that, I am currently using a modified version of the BWS HA Bridge running on a Windows 10 Intel NUC and is brilliant. Commands are executed very quickly

     

    I definitely would recommend running a local HA Bridge over the Fibaro Cloud solution

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    9 hours ago, oztourer said:

    I just bought an Amazon Echo specifically for its Fibaro support, which I expected to be available in all regions. If I switch my account to the US store just to get the Fibaro skill I will presumably lose access to Amazon's Australia store and quite possibly lose access to Alexa skills specific to Australia. This makes no sense, given that my Fibaro is built for and sold to the Australian market.

    So who is responsible for the lack of the Fibaro skill in Australia - Amazon or Fibaro?

    I have @skarotech automation bridge with my 4 google homes.  I also have used the BWS systems ha-bridge.  skarotech's bridge is stupid simple to setup, use period.  you cant mess it up, its so easy you can have it up and running in less then 20min.  now the ha-bridge is super sensitive to setup each command, setup the bridge through your hue bridge 2 if you use hue bulbs.  the commands can be a pain in the butt to setup and use.  it took me almost a week and half to add all the commands for each of my relays i have in my home.  skarotechs bridge will auto-discover EVERYTHING on your HC2 without any coding. you can select what items you want it to use with toggle switches.  it works with the echo, google assistant, and siri.  the cost of his bridge outways the hassle of trying to setup a raspberry pi, installing the ha-bridge from command lines, then trying to find all the correct off/on, dim commands.  

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    Thanks all for your responses. The hardware bridge sounds like the easiest solution but I will give the software HA Bridge a try first. I run an always-on Linux server at home and already use MQTT as an interface between Fibaro scenes and my Android phones, so I have the options of using HA Bridge to support devices and MQTT via HA Bridge if the bridge turns out not to support scenes. I will report back once I have tried it.

     

    I did install the Fibaro skills using an alternative Amazon account tied to a UK address and although it works for devices it is slow to respond, and my Lua scenes (i.e. all of them) are apparently not supported. I like that the bridge solutions all operate locally within my network and therefore should give much better response times.

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    It turns out that HA Bridge meets my needs very well - I have been able to set up a link to my home MQTT server and define a number of messages; I have a Python-scripted daemon which subscribes to the relevant topics and activates Fibaro scenes as requested. The response times are very good - much better than any cloud-based solution. I have retired the Custom Fibaro Skill and for now retained the Fibaro Smart Home Skill in case I want to activate individual devices, something which I yet hope to implement using HA Bridge.

     

    The website for HA Bridge warns that the software does not work with the second-gen Echo but I have found it to work flawlessly so far.

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    Final update: all my Fibaro devices are now set up as MQTT topics/messages in HA Bridge and I have been able to retire the Fibaro Smart Home Skill. This means that all devices and scenes are 'connected' locally to my Echo speaker and respond quickly to requests. I am one happy camper!

     

    I can appreciate that setting up actual Fibaro devices in HA Bridge  would be a bit of a pain but the MQTT solution proved to be much easier. I just needed to support topics such as fibaro/scene/run, fibaro/device/on and fibaro/device/off, providing in each case the device or scene name as message content. My Python script  on startup pulls a list of device ID's and their associated names from the Fibaro, saving me the pain of including device ID's in my MQTT messages on HA Bridge.
     

    This solution has the added advantage that my Python script is subscribed to MQTT messages but doesn't care where they come from. I can use a general-purpose Android app (MQTT dashboard) to generate those same MQTT messages and therefore control the Fibaro from both Alexa and my phone.

     

    So, the chains of command are now (devices in bold, software in italics):

                    [Echo]  ->  [HA Bridge]  ---->  [Mosquitto MQTT server]  <----  [persistent Python script]  ->  [Fibaro HC2]

                    [Android device]  ->  [MQTT Dashboard] -- --^

     

    This just scratches the surface of what is possible using MQTT messages but I hope this summary gives food for thought.

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