In our primary home I am using openHAB for various integrations and automations, and Alexa for voice control. Now I‘d like to do the same with a second home, with a separate openHAB installation.
Regarding Alexa, it seems I have to make a decision whether to use one Amazon accounts or two. The problem with one account is that room names need to be unique, I cannot have two „living room“. Apart from that, one account seems easier to manage.
How would it work with openHAB, can I connect two openHAB instances with one Amazon account?
Looking forward to your ideas and maybe also stories how you manage two homes with Alexa.
I don’t know if Alexa will allow two accounts connected at the same time. But depending on the nature of the configuration you might be ale to use the Remote openHAB add-on or the MQTT Even Bus rule template to link the two OH instances. Then only the “main” one is actually connected to Alexa and the “remote” instance only forwards commands and such.
There are lots of nuances and I’m not suggesting this is the best way but it is a way if no other solution reveals itself.
You can connect the two instances through myopenhab.org (I think) or use a VPN to connect the networks of the two houses.
The skill can only connect to one myopenhab.org account. You can’t have the same skill enabled multiple times on one Amazon account. And as far as I know, you can’t have two instances connected to the same cloud connector.
As @rlkoshak suggested, using the Remote openHAB binding on your primary server and a VPN connection between the two sites would be the best solution for your use case.
Thanks, so if I’d like to keep the openHAB instances separate, then going with two Amazon accounts and two myopenhab.org accounts seem to be the way to go. Now I have to check if I can link one Sonos account to two Amazon accounts, or if also two Sonos accounts would be required.
You could also deploy your own skill connected to your second myopenhab.org account while still using the same Amazon account. This is basically a hack to allow two instances of the skill under one Amazon account but you would be maintaining the skill you deployed.
So setting up Sonos with two different Alexa /Amazon accounts worked fine.
Within Sonos, the two homes are managed as two separate systems within one Sonos account. The link between Sonos and Alexa/Amazon is per system, so we now have one Sonos system linked to one Alexa/Amazon account and the other Sonos system to a second Alexa/Amazon account.
That way we also have separate Alexa namespaces for the two homes and can use the same room and device names in both homes.
We actively use the Sonos app a lot, so it is good to have everything under one account there. The Alexa app we use only for adminstrative purposes and have it installed on two different devices so we do not have to login/logout every time we need it.
Next I‘ll set up openHAB in the second home, with a separate myopenhab.org account.
I still might have a use case for linking the two openHAB instances, each home has an evcc instance for solar charging, and I‘d like to collect data in one place. Not sure yet if the evcc binding supports two separate instances.
I have a similar situation, with openHAB in both our primary and vacation homes. I set it up 4 years ago, early in my openHAB journey and may not have the optimum solution, but happy to share what I have done, if I can remember what I did and why.
I ended up with a hybrid set up.
I created a new Amazon account for the vacation home. I linked the smart devices to skills on that account. Most of the skills use the same account information as the other location, and it doesn’t seem to bother them that I have two Amazon accounts linked to their skills.
But the new account could not take advantage of things like Amazon Music tied to the Amazon Prime on the original account. So I have one Echo Dot and an Echo Link Amp that are physically at the second home, are connected to the original account. I can use verbal Alexa commands to play music. A different Echo Dot is connected to the new account and I use it to control random lights using Amazon Guard functionality on the new account.
I have a similar situation. I have Alexa connected to my primary OpenHAB system. I use tailscale to connect to my secondary OpenHAB and use the remoteserver binding.
In our case we use Spotify as streaming service, and Spotify does not mind if multiple Amazon (or Sonos) accounts are linked to it.
Only problem with that is that each Spotify account allows only one stream at the same time. We have a Family plan that supports multiple accounts with one stream each, but need to use the Spotify app to make use of that. Which is fine if it is my wife who wants to listen on her own, but if I want to start a second stream (e.g. for our baby daughter and myself), I need to get ahold of my wife‘s phone.
Can Amazon Music support multiple streams for one account?
Hmmm. I think Amazon is OK is there is one channel streaming on one device and another channel streaming on a different device, both on the same Amazon account. I know my wife and I sometimes have different streams going, but not I’m not sure if the Echo in her craft room is on my Amazon account or hers. Of course our accounts are linked, at least for Prime Purposes.
