Month: October 2018

I’ve spent recent weeks (months even!) looking at how I can bring simple automation and voice control to my home. In my quest to create a “Smart Home” I came across the Sonoff T1 UK-specification wall switch. At just ~£15 and when coupled with Tasmota, an Open Source firmware (from what I have read, I wouldn’t consider using the native firmware) that is suitable for a variety of ESP powered devices, this wi-fi connected switch becomes a very compelling product.

I’ve now got a bunch of these around the house, integrated with the Node Red Alexa Smart Skill v3 Bridge. Over the last three months these have proven to be very reliable (faultless actually) and very effective when paired with the custom multi-sensors I have built using ESP8266 NodeMCU boards to drive automation. I figured I would share my experience/ how I got them up and running.

Note that this guide assumes you have a secure MQTT server available for use, and Node-RED deployed should you want to take advantage of the Node Red Alexa Smart Skill v3 Bridge. If you’ve not got either of these in-place watch this space – further guides to follow.

Last week I posted about the Node-RED Smart Home Control skill / bridge. I’ve spent the week on ensuring the majority of device types or “capabilities” are are now supported by the bridge. It’s now possible to define devices that support:

• Playback controls (Play, pause, stop)
• Input changing (such as HDMI1, Audio1)
• Volume (in steps)
• Power (on /off)
• Brightness (in %)
• Colour (Red, Green, Blue etc)
• Colour temperature (in Kelvin or warm-white through to daylight)
• Temperature (in °C or °F)

Hopefully this means you’re now able to use commands that are more “natural” to interact with Node-RED flows that control your Smart Devices.

To further the usability of the service it is now possible (required!) to set minimum and maximum values on thermostats (in °C or °F) and smart bulbs (in Kelvin).  Any commands that fall “out of range” will not be processed by the bridge and you will get the appropriate feedback from Alexa. Again, hopefully this makes interaction with the service more intuitive.

Finally, I’ve simplified the response node. Use logic in your flows to return a “true” or “false” value as an input to this node. Any flow that starts with a Node-RED Alexa v3 node should return a payload of “true” where the command/ request is processed successfully and “false” where it is not.

I’ll be updating the documentation with more flow examples in the coming week.

Want to get involved, contribute or start testing the service as outlined in the documentation!