Amazon Alexa Dot
What a wonderful device I purchased a couple of years ago, an Amazon Dot. But like a lot of women she can be quite frustrating to interface with!
Veranda Control
I recently purchased and erected a louvre roof from China which includes two controlled louvre areas and three curtains. All these are controlled by five 433MHz wireless controllers. Naturally, I would like Alexa to control these and I know she can. She needs a little help to talk to them but this is solved by Broadlink with their brilliant Smart Universal Remote Control. After getting one of these I was able to program all five louvre roof remotes (and my TV & sound system) into the Android IHC app and control them from my mobile phone. I can also set scenes where I can open or close all five with one command.
Alexa Mqtt Bridge & Printer Server
I also run a Raspberry Pi Zero W as an MQTT server/broker in my home and naturally I need to have Alexa talk to this in order to interface with my home IoT devices. I implemented this NPM module and can open and close garage doors with a command like “Alexa, Geoff garage on”. By using this magic module, Alexa thinks the bridged device is a light.
I had to add a new task to the Raspberry Pi recently. I have a non-wifi printer that lives in another room apart from the computer so I added a printer server.
Node-RED Alexa Home Skill Bridge
I looked briefly at this solution but it requires registration with a third party service and I want to use my in-house server. See www.npmjs.com
Resources
Node-Red node for Amazon Alexa Skills Kit (ASK).
https://www.npmjs.com/package/alexa-skills
https://www.npmjs.com/package/alexa-app
https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=node-red%20alexa&page=1&ranking=optimal
https://github.com/mattmattmatt/alexa-deviceadapter
https://github.com/mattmattmatt/alexa-iot
To Be Continued……..