[SOLVED] Problem with (Own) Cloud and (Own) Alexa Skill

Hey there,

after the myopenhab cloud is offline again for days, i decided to switch to a self hosted version of openhab cloud, which works like a charm.

Next step was to setup alexa-openhab v3 to use again alexa with my own cloud of openhab. So i setup anything on AWS with Lambda, Skills and so on. I have installed the Private Skill and could successfully link it to my Amazon Account.

When i call my Openhab rest API with items?metadata=alexa i also got a list of alexa enabled items.

But when i try to discover new Devices in Alexa Smarthome, it doesn’t even call my openhab endpoint as i can see in the access logs. SSL is valid and userpass and endpoint in the Lambda function are correct.

Any suggestions?

Ok, the Problem was: an amazon smart home skill requires a lmbda function deployed next to the users “location” (language). So as the skill is available in german, i had to deploy the lambda function to ireland instead of north virginia, then everything is fine.

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Hi - wonder if you or anyone could share the “how to” on the integration of your own openhab cloud server with Alexa. There is some information out there and I have previously managed it through luck more than judgement, but having moved house and created a whole new set up from scratch I am not getting very far with this bit.

Hue Emulation worked for a bit - but became hit and miss. So I am currently back to using myopenhab.org but would like the ability to have my own private instance in case the public version goes offline again as it will render my house tricky to manage!

Hope someone can help with clear steps on this.

Thanks

If your plan is just to use Alexa, you can directly point your private skill to your server removing the need to run your own openhab cloud connector.

Sounds interesting - do you have any guides on this speicifc implemementation? Wouldn’t that involve presenting my OpenHab server to the internet? As there is no authorisation on this wouldn’t that mean anybody could access my server if they had the url?

Am I missing something?

Thanks

Not I am aware of. There might be some tutorials on this forum related to setting up a reverse proxy server, such as nginx, to allow external calls to reach your OH server.

Correct but if you will be running a private cloud connector, you would be doing the same unless you were planning to set it up with another cloud service provider.

While, it’s true there is no authentication out of the box when connecting to an OH server, using a reverse proxy server, as I mentioned above, would allow you to add the authentication layer in front preventing anyone without the proper credentials from accessing your OH server, along with securing the communication via a SSL certificate.

How did you deployed to Ireland? if I try to change the skill I got the error:
ailed to save skill information

Please make sure that "Alexa Smart Home" is selected for the event source type, for provided arn [Invalid value] : arn:aws:lambda:eu-west-1:XXXXXXXXXX:function:alexa-openhab

EDIT: ok lambda is created now in the correct region, but discovery can’t find anything, why?

Also having this issue:

EDIT: ok lambda is created now in the correct region, but discovery can’t find anything, why?

When on the US Lambda it works fine, no support whatsoever from amazon

had same issue when trying to create it for german language in eu-west
finally gave up as skill was unable to find any devices.

I had the same problem. I got that message “Please make sure that “Alexa Smart Home” is selected for the event source type, for provided arn [Invalid value] : arn:aws:lambda:eu-west-1:XXXXXXXXXX:function:alexa-openhab”
Finally I discover that i already a lambda “alexa-openhab” created. I deleted it from aws console https://console.aws.amazon.com/lambda/ and the tried again. It worked.

But I still can’t get connect Alexa Skill with my private openhab cloud

I got a question that’s kind of related. I’ve heard that you can have Alexa totally offline, without any internet connection, working by hosting it on premise, but I can’t find any information. Do you know about that?

Look up hue emulation.