I have the openhab app on my phone, and I can connect locally and remotely to operate the demo switches I have configured. I also have an Amazon Echo Dot with the Openhab skill installed and connected to the myopenhab account.
Questions:
Openhab skill in Alexa does not see any of the demo switches that the openhab app (and the web interface on my PC) sees. It doesn’t see any devices, groups or scenes. (of note: I have no actual devices to control yet, just dummy placeholders in openhab)
I cannot control any of the demo switches by voice. I can’t even tell if Alexa can see the openhab setup. I went through the account linking process in the Alexa app and it said it was setup, but since I cant see any of the demo switches I’m thinking it’s not working. Every time I ask Alexa to turn on the kitchen, she says she can’t find a device or group name kitchen in my account.
Thank you for a wonderful system, I hope to get this working soon!
So I guess I have to go through the whole amazon developer account and AWS and all that?
If so, Im stuck here:
AWS Lambda Function
You can certainly create the lambda function manually, but the openhab team provides a script that does the heavy lifting for you.
If you haven’t already, clone the repo, and copy the template config files
git clone https://github.com/openhab/openhab-alexa.git
cd openhab-alexa
cp config_sample.js config.js
cp env_sample .env
No, thats only if you wish to run your own development version or your own myopenhab instance, not our hosted version. If you have linked your account successfully, and you have your openhab instance connected to myopenhab then you are almost there. The last thing that you need to do is “tag” the items you want alexa to see. The reason we do this is many people of lots (dozens, hundreds, more ? ) of items and you don’t want alexa to see all of them. So you need to add the right tag to your item file. See the first post in the link that @sihui mentions.
The things file is empty because I dont actually have any “things” to control yet.
Here is the sitemap file:
sitemap home label="MK-SmartHouse"
{
Frame label="Demo"
{
Switch item=BedLightSwitch
}
}
I guess Im just not understanding how to “tag” items, I thought thats what the items file does, give names to things.
Ive googled until im blue and Im just not finding any information on item tagging. I have enabled the HomeKit on Alexa but still cant find where to link to voice commands.
I have no other hardware other than Amazon Echo Dot and RasPi running openhab 2.0.
Is a physical device required to make this work? I have a couple wifi enabled power strips on the way but just wanted to get some dummy switches responding to voice commands through alexa first.
