Node-RED Smart Home Control Updated

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!