Ok, four days in and I’m loosing the will to live - not a great start
I have got openHAB2 configured, and running as a Windows Service - the UI works exactly as I would expect, I can control my lights, switches and even Kodi. Great! Except…Kodi refuses to play nice with Alexa. I have everything going via myopenhab, I can even get Alexa to locate the “Control” item - but ONLY if it is tagged with “Lighting” or “Switchable” and the device type is set to “Switch”. If I try and tell it that it is a “Player” Alexa can’t find it. I’ve spent days trying to find a solution via Google (and others) but had nothing but bad luck.
Does anybody have a nice, step by step, idiots guide to getting these things to play nice? Or should I just kick this in the head and accept that Alexa and openHAB2 are not for me?
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated…I might even get to keep some of my hair
I don’t use Alexa so my advice is suspect already. But based on the Alexa Skill docs it uses the HomeKit tagging scheme and the HomeKit docs does not list a Player tag. So I would guess that Player is not yet supported.
The Alexa skill currently only supports switchable items (so anything you can send an on/off command) and thermostats at this point. You can do some trickery such as using percentage to control rollershutters, but something as specific as playback controls is going to be difficult unless your comfortable with something like “turn on pause.”
I think trying to control Kodi through OpenHAB through Alexa might be going about it the long way. I know at one point there was an Alexa skill for Kodi, although it involved creating a custom skill and opening a hole in your firewall. I’m not sure if it’s still being maintained.
If you use Emby as a backend, they have Alexa support and I’m fairly certain Kodi is supported as a player. Plex also has an Alexa skill, although I’m not sure if Kodi is supported as a player.
I use Emby as my backend so I will be trying out the Alexa support as soon as I get done with this kitchen remodel and get some free time.
Hi guys, thanks for the replies - please don’t take this the wrong way but it’s not quite what I was hoping for, but that’s life I guess I can only hope that one day OpenHAB/Homekit will have full Kodi/media player Alexa integration - one would think that HomeKit would support players with there being those Apple TV devices, seems an odd omission.
As it turns out the Kodi skill for Alexa is still supported (like so many FOSS projects one fork was abandoned the other is still ongoing: https://github.com/m0ngr31/kodi-alexa) - I’ve included the link as others may find it useful. It’s far from perfect, but it does work. Of course, you need an Amazon dev account, a place to host the server code (easy for me, maybe not for others) and the opening of the firewall is a bit .
I did manage to get the stop command working, as you say adding ‘virtual’ switches - but I think we can all agree that method sucks Thanks for the Emby suggestion, I’m going to look into it, looks like there are some additional challenges as my Kodi is on a Raspberry Pi - nothing ventured nothing gained.
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