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Smart Home

Node-RED Alexa Home Skill

It’s been a while since I posted, but I’ve been busy… Somehow, despite having no interest in it six months ago, I got into Home Automation, or setting up a “Smart” Home. Over the last 6 months I have:

  • purchased a variety of sensors and electronic components, Fresnel lenses and NodeMCU boards from China
  • designed/ modified circuits, learnt to solder (badly!)
  • written firmware for NodeMCU based multi-sensors
  • modified 3D designs in TinkerCAD
  • printed 3D models via 3D Hubs
  • flashed firmware of wi-fi light switches
  • (re)written a NodeJS/ MQTT and Amazon Lambda function that drive a Node-RED Alexa add-on

Lots more posts to come, but I wanted to share the latter of these activities with you first.

In my quest to enable voice control over a variety of devices I came across a Ben Hardill’s Node Red Alexa Home Skill Bridge. Ben created a Node-RED Alexa Smart Home  Skill API version 2 add-on that enables Alexa interaction with flows. No sooner had I found this and started to use it I wanted more… ! This is where the Smart Home Skill API version 3 comes in – it allows for a swathe of new voice commands to control playback, volume, inputs and other devices that version 2 did not cater for.

Unfortunately (for me at least) the API syntax has fundamentally changed. This meant figuring out Ben’s service and re-writing elements of it to work with the new API. Whilst I was at it I also updated the web interface to Bootstrap 4, and remediated some NodeJS/ Mongoose functions that were no longer supported in the original service.

The net result… My wife and kids love the fact they can turn on/ off the TV, pause, play and stop video, increase/  decrease and mute volume as well as control the lights with their voice. Couple the lighting control with Alexa “room awareness” and the whole system becomes very user friendly – i.e. “Alexa, turn on the lights.” The multi-sensors add some additional functionality/ capabilities, but I’ll save that for another day.

At this point the skill is in “Dev” – meaning it is not a publicly available Alexa Skill – however, get in touch and I can add you to the list of people able to test the service out.

You can read the intricate detail about the service on GitHub, or request access and get testing.

 

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