Combined use of of Amazon Alexa and IFTTT

Hi all,

Sorry if this is a bit long, but this is my first post and I just wanna provide some background. Did my first forays into openhab a couple of years ago, but at some point gave up due to limited time and too many issues with the then fresh 2.0 version. Since then I’ve been with Z-Way and Alexa, but decided to give openHAB a new try since a few weeks since I really like the general structure of openHAB. Up until now I have just been a reader in this community (so this is the first post) and have been impressed by the amount and quality of contributions and have been able to sort out most issues I have run into. At one point I was close to giving up - I’m running openhabian on a Pi2, and I ran an update from openhabian-config that destroyed the boot structure on the SD card, and since I so far don’t have completed the basic setup I never made any backups. I’ll eventually contribute how I finally recovered from that if it could help somebody.

Now to the problem I have right now that again has pushed me to almost give up again; I want to use Alexa as the main UI to openHAB, since the rest of the family also needs to find the home automation usable, and they like and use Alexa for other stuff. I also have an AEG RX9 (same as Electrolux Pure i9 outside Germany) that only communicates with the dedicated app and via IFTTT. I started to set up IFTTT before reading up on the Alexa skill and understanding the full scope. My mistake I guess, but I’m still a learner. So first I followed the documentation for IFTTT, configured my openHAB to connect to myOpenHAB and spent a decent amount of time troubleshooting why my things ever appeared on myOpenHAB. Finally stoped trying and started searching in the forums just to find that this was turned off half a year ago. Solution? Set up your own openhab-cloud. Luckily I found a great step-by-step from @garagehacker on how to set up openhab-cloud on Azure, so now I have a setup that works with my private instance of openhab-cloud, openHAB 2.5, the iOS app and IFTTT. Yay! :tada: Most of the things I have are hooked up and working (Hue, Trådfri except the blinds, Yamaha, Homematic IP, TR064, Harmony etc)

Next step was then to switch things from being directly manned from Alexa to hook Alexa up to openHAB, so started checking how to tell the Alexa skill to connect to my private openhab-cloud. Conclusion as far as I have found; this is a no-go. Only way is to set up AWS, Alexa developer account and so on.

So finally my questions:
Is there currently no way to combine IFTTT and Alexa without spending hours and hours of setting up workarounds?
Why is the official documentation for IFTTT still referring to setting up myOpenHAB.com when this has been disabled since more than 6 months? This made me waste several hours on troubleshooting.

Sorry for the long post, but I’m at the end of my rope
Best regards,
Anders

People were abusing that so, until somebody sets up a similar subscription solution, you need to set up your own cloud server.

The non-profit foundation running myopenhab cannot charge for services and does not have the resources to increase server capacity. They turned off that feature to prevent the server from continuously crashing.

Since you like Alexa have you read this topic: Preview and Beta: Amazon Echo Control

You can use Alexa skill apps to control devices via OH.

Thanks for the hint. I have the Echo Control binding set up already to do TTS, but I hadn’t thought of checking if Electrolux/AEG had released any native Alexa skill for the i9/RX9. Unfortunately after some searching it seems there is still no other way to control their robovacs than via IFTTT.