Alexa action when contact sensor left open

Tips & Tricks
1

If you have a contact sensor left open, it would be nice to be able to have Alexa take some action (like make an announcement). Unfortunately, “left open” is not an available trigger in Alexa routines for a Wyze sensor. Only open/close can be used as triggers. Here’s a way around that. It does require an unused Wyze plug. It is similar to the solution here, but doesn’t require any other third party integrations…

  1. Name your spare Wyze plug “Alexa Trigger”.
  2. Create a Wyze Rule with trigger “contact sensor open for X minutes”
  3. Set action for this rule to turn on plug “Alexa Trigger”
  4. Create an Alexa routine with trigger “Alexa Trigger” plug turns on
  5. Set actions for the routine to whatever action you want Alexa to take (eg. announcement) and also have it turn off the Alexa Trigger plug.

When the contact sensor is left open for the specified time, the Wyze rule will turn on the plug, which will be detected by the Alexa routine which will turn the plug back off and do whatever else you’d like Alexa to do. Nothing needs to be attached to the plug.

Of course, if this gets implemented, then the plug would not be necessary.

6 Likes
2

Nice work around.

But,
Is this an Alexa Problem ?
or a
A Wyze Wishlist item ?

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3

I don’t know if it’s something that Wyze needs to implement or that Alexa needs to. Most likely it’s a little of both.

That said, there is a wishlist topic for this here:

This feature is first on the list. Be sure to go VOTE for it if you haven’t already and comment on the need for this feature.

I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the priority for this, but I just asked and was told that my contact will poke the person responsible for this area about it. Fingers crossed.

1 Like
4

That helped me. Thank you. I also upvoted the feature request.

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5

I figured I would post here as it is one of the first things in Google when you look for a way to have Alexa announce if a door is left open. In my case, I wanted to have a contact sensor on the refrigerator trigger an announcement after 2 minutes that the door was still open. Now, in a perfect world, the Alexa app would have a door left open trigger, but it does not, so here we are. The way I was able to get around this was to use an old tablet with the IFTTT and Wyze apps and Voice Monkey Alexa Skill. Now, the key here is that the tablet acts like a bridge for the Wyze app and IFTTT. One would think that the IFTTT skill would have the door left open trigger as well, but it does not either, so this bridge is the missing link.

Here are the steps to follow:

  1. I set up the Wyze app to notify me when the door is left open after 2 minutes.
  2. I then set up a Routine Trigger with Voicemonkey called “Kitchen Door Open”
  3. Then I set up an IFTTT applet to use the Android Device - Notification received from a specific app trigger
  4. Then the action for the IFTTT applet that calls the previously created Voicemonkey Routine Trigger
  5. Now, in the Alexa app, you need to link the Voicemonkey skill and then create a routine triggered by the previously created Voicemonkey Routine Trigger and have it set to announce that the door is left open.

While a little convoluted, you are basically using Voicemonkey as a virtual switch that Alexa can monitor.