Release Candidate and Support: Amazon Echo Control Binding

Yes that comment was for you :wink:

What you‘re talking about is the Alexa Skill for openHAB. It let‘s you expose items from oH to Alexa so you‘re able to control them with your Echo devices.

In this thread it‘s about controlling the Echo devices from openHAB.
You‘re able to send TextToSpeech, check the lastVoiceCommand or controll the music playback.

Kind regards
Michael

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All warnings are gone. Good work :+1:

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Ive just uninstalled the 2.4.0 binding and installed the org.openhab.binding.amazonechocontrol_2.5.0.Beta_05.jar as a replacement.

Everything seems fine, and the crazy stacktracing regarding Amazon URLs in openhab.log has stopped - Good work !!

BR,

Normann

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If I want to turn off the screens on my echo show and spot devices I can issue the command “Alexa, screen off”. Could this functionality be provided using the control binding ?

Is this function available in the alexa app, too?

Hi there,

This is a normal voice command I give to my show and spot devices to get them to switch the screens off. I cant find any specific action within the Alexa app that offers this as an option when building a routine. It just appears to be something that can be spoken. Perhaps the API you use exposes this functionality ?

Regards
Karl.

No, there exist no documented offical API. Only call of the aop can be used.
Sorry, I can‘t help in this case.

No problem. Thanks for checking.

I was wondering where to find the correct commands for the Player Item.
e.g. for next track i thought it is “next track”, but I found out thats just “NEXT”.

Channel Type ID Item Type Access Mode Thing Type Description
player Player R/W echo, echoshow, echospot, wha Control the music player e.g. pause/continue/next track/previous track

Monitoring Run Away Echo Alarms

I want to monitor run away echo alarms and shut them off automatically; has anybody done something like this through OH?

My family sometimes sets an alarm for the morning and then gets up before the alarm and forgets to cancel the alarm. I walk up there hours later and the alarm is still going off for many hours from when it was set.

Any thoughts how to do this?

Best, Jay

Could somebody explain me the basics of how this binding works?
I mean as far as I understood every action is simulated on the Webinterface of Alexa.

Could someone link me the file on github for setting an reminder ?

I want to adapt that code and modify so I can set timers via the binding too.

Do you need VoiceRSS to use TTS with this binding or does this have it’s own internal text to speech capability? If it still needs VoiceRSS what is the difference? Note I have a Sonos ONE so maybe it’s something related to pure Amazon Echo devices?

Thanks.

JR

Hey guys,

awesome binding. I have a couple of questions about the startRoutine function, maybe someone is in my same boat.

  1. the command list mentions this for the command. “Type in what you normally say to Alexa without the preceding “Alexa,””.
    Let’ say you have a smart home device linked to the amazoin echo called “Light”.
    Will a mapping with “Light ON” passed to the startRoutine command trigger the switch?
    I cannot seem to crack this, instead I have to create a specific routing and map such routine’s name.

  2. With this create routine and call through mapping method I am running into the problem that for some routine (seems to be completely random and it changes from one day to another), I am getting the log message “Routine XXX not found”, where XXX is the routine name (I’ve tried all caps, no caps, no spaces, spaces). cannot seem to find a solution where all routines are found.
    Some routines work right away, some other work after i edit their name, some don’t work at all, some work one day and return the “not found” message the following day.

Anyone ran into this before?

Thanks

Hi Ray,
if you can test ALL channels and give me feedback which one are working, I would provide a thing definition for it.
Best,
Michael

Thanks for the hint, I should provide a better documentation here. You will find the commands here: openhab player item commands:
PLAY , PAUSE, NEXT , PREVIOUS, REWIND , FASTFORWARD,

Instead of play and pause, you can use
ON , OFF
too, it makes technically the same.

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I think this would be currently only possible with REST calls through the proxy. I will provide this feature to stop an alarm in a future version through the channel.

Btw, I’am thinking about the possibility to provide a synchronization for alarms between alexa devices. I think, it would be very useful to define groups of devices, which shares the alarm. But currently I have no really good idea, how this can be fit in the thing, channel structure of openHAB.
Any ideas?

The echo thing is defined here.

The connection with all the REST calls can be found here.

Best,
Michael

The text to speech is done by the alexa device itself. There is no additional software needed for this.

Have a discussion in another thread about something and was suggested to bring it over here. May be more relevant. I ordered a Echo Plus 2nd Generation. Comes with a Phillips hue light. Apparently the 2nd gen has a hue hub built in. Not sure if that is separate from the zigbee functionality? Was trying to see if there was a way to manage the hue hub built in or any way to access the devices that Alexa is aware of thru it’s skills to indirectly manage it? I guess if I ask Alexa to turn it off it will work, but will eliminate any whole room turn off capabilities I could do thru OpenHAB.

Thanks.

JR

No, this is not possible.

That is interesting. The binding work in this way:

  • Lookup for all defined routines
  • Check for matching voice trigger
  • Starting the commands defined in the routine with the routine preview function

You can try to get the defined routines through the proxy server manually be entering this url in a browser (Please replace the and tokens):

http://<YourOpenHab>/amazonechocontrol/<YourAccountThingId>/PROXY/api/behaviors/automations

The result is very difficult to read, it helps to use an online json formatter service to bring the output in a more readable format.