Controling Tv and others electronics with ALEXA

[JDRoberts]

@jr0

If anyone here is more familiar with virtual switches, I’m having one small problem. On and off work perfectly as long as the TV is always turned on and off with alexa. If you get the items out of sync, it no longer works correctly. Scenario today: Turned on TV with Alexa. Someone else turned off with remote. The virtual switch was left in the wrong state, so Alexa would not turn the tv back on. A quick toggle of the virtual switch and everything is ok again, but that’s not very elegant. Anyone solve this one yet?

This is discussed at length in the project topic. Two different methods are detailed there for solving the synch issue.

Alexa + SmartThings + IFTTT + Harmony to turn TV on and off by voice (2015 version)

Updated 12 November 2015 after Amazon added “Triggers” to their IFTTT Channel for Alexa As valuable as I personally found this project, and as much as I learned in doing it, as of 12 November 2015 it’s now no longer necessary. Amazon has added verbal triggers to their IFTTT channel. So you can say anything you want to as a trigger to Alexa and use that as the “if” for an IFTTT recipe, and have that trigger anything that has an IFTTT “that” channel. So SmartThings, Philips Hue, Harmony activities, etc. No virtual switches needed, no synch issues. It really is that easy. If you’re new to IFTTT, here’s a good overview: You may still want to use the direct Harmony/SmartThings integration to control certain aspects of TV watching, like limiting your kids to 30 minutes of Net…