I don’t have that binding installed but I can add alexa metadata.
I want to send commands from Alexa to my openHAB instance .
I have read the page about the Alexa skill and am planning to submit some suggestions for improving that documentation, but before I can do that, I first need to understand things myself. From what I can tell now, the main reason why that documentation page is not helping me is that it doesn’t start with instructions and the headings are somewhat misleading:
The heading Setup suggests that what follows are instructions for how to set things up. But the first thing that follows is a lost of what has been improved in version 3 of the API. - Fair enough. I’m experienced enough to realize that this is irrelevant for me so I jump to the next paragraph: “Requirements”. Very good. It tells me what I need, so I make sure I have that. Check
And now I’m missing the most important section on the page: instructions explaining the overall setup. Before I can understand the recommendations, there is a lot I need to know.
I’ll blame myself for not immediately understanding that the only thing I need to install is the skill on my amazon device and the openHAB Cloud connector on my OH instance. But I’d suggest to clarify that. Also what exactly needs to be configured in the Cloud Connector addon (and where in OH3 I can find it once it’s installed). The documentation is very short. (I’m not complaining, just explaining why I’m asking questions.)
Anyway, that’s where I am now. Trying to figure out what else I need to know before I can make use of those “Recommendations”. I think one think that should be mentioned is about exposing Items in the cloud connector addon.
I don’t quite get it. My intuition tells me that whatever I select to expose here will be exposed to myopenhab.org (and hence Alexa) and everything else will not be exposed. But this is not what I’m seeing. I have not yet exposed anything (and the list of Items on myopenHAB.org is empty) but my Alexa device found one of my openHAB devices today. I know it’s an openHAB device because it has a strange label (“Control”), which is the default label it was assigned in my semantic model.
The reason why Alexa discovered the item seems to be that I added Alexa Metadata to it:
So I would imagine that the next step in the instructions would be to add such metadata to relevant items (and to create those items if they don’t exist yet).
I’ll stop here, but I hope the above might help to clarify the troubles of a new user, which, I know, are often difficult to anticipate for experienced users (who tend to be the ones writing the documentation…).
I have read enough about the Echo Control binding to understand that I don’t need it as I don’t want to control the Alexa devices via openHAB but the other way around.