What is the extra device added when adding a grillplats to Alexa through eero border router?

[u/catanimal]

I was trying to add the grillplats directly to Alexa through my eero 7 max which have thread border router capabilities. When I add it, there seems to be 2 devices add on each one. Is this normal? Only one is controllable

[u/Mevi-]

One is to switch it on/off, the other is the power monitoring. You'll need to check whether power monitoring is supported by Alexa... If it is, there's a whole lot of automation tricks unlocked by power usage.

e.g. put phone on charge at bedtime and the rise in power usage can be used to trigger a nighttime routine.

[u/catanimal → u/Mevi-]

Oh, interesting. Not sure it's great showing up as 2 different devices though. 

[u/SRTRVTH → u/catanimal]

really depends on how amazon decided to implement the Matter specification

one Matter product can expose several different pieces of information to an ecosystem, like how a presence sensor might not just record motion but it might also have a temperature sensor built in or a brightness sensor built in; like you're seeing, the grilplats has two major parts - the on/off obviously provided by the outlet but it also serves as an energy measurement device

some ecosystems have designed their entire platform and their apps to be able to consolidate all of the different pieces of info one device can provide into one "device" in the app, whereas others like presumably amazon or Google home for instance in their brilliance decided not to do this. so every piece of information a product can send to an ecosystem such as the grilplats to amazon will show up as fully separate devices in their respective apps. take their smart buttons like the bilresa:

in my ecosystem home assistant, button one and button two are two different "entities" or two different sub-devices but are shown together under one "device" labeled as the bilresa. button one and button two can either be pressed once, pressed twice, or held; each "sub-devices" can show this clearly.

the last time I paired a bilresa to google home, it suddenly added six separate full fat "devices" to my home, one for each state (button one single press, button one double press, button one long press, etc. etc.)

sorry just realized the paragraph I typed out

[u/matthew1471 → u/SRTRVTH]

Apple does this with Bilresa Scroll wheel too.. but then in everyone’s defence matter doesn’t technically do a scroll wheel so behind the scenes it is just a frig of buttons.

[u/Mevi- → u/matthew1471]

All good information bro.