Playing around with Amazon Echo (technical interface discussion)

Thanks for the shout. :blush: They’ve said existing bulbs will work, not existing bridges. But that there would be some kind of upgrade option for the bridge. It’s all (officially) murky yet. :mag_right: :bulb:

Details will be officially released in September.

As for what would and wouldn’t break, that would come down to the details. No way to know yet.

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They’ve said existing bulbs will work, not existing bridges. But that there would be some kind of upgrade option for the bridge.

This to me might be the best solution so long as that upgrade is optional. People that want HomeKit can upgrade code or buy a new bridge, while people that have zero interest in putting Apple in the middle of their world could use their existing hardware as-is. I’m done buying smart lights in favor of smart switches these days, so if I can use what I have the way I have it I’ll be happy enough.

With that out of the way - has anyone tried adding the emulator to Logitech Harmony? Version 0.2.0 added enough emulation code to allow Harmony Hub remotes to pick up the emulator and add the defined devices as Hue lamps. I’ve kicked the tires on it and it’s fast. I don’t seem to be able to get it to pick up status (on/off or dim level) but I don’t think the Echo could do that either. Sending on/off/dim commands from the Harmony is as fast and reliable as anything else. This really doesn’t impact ST users much because we already have Harmony integration. Still, it’s neat to see work on this software being pushed forward.

My integration using zpriddy’s solution is set where my term is ‘Alexa tell my house to turn off kitchen lights’ and ‘Alexa tell my house to switch mode to night’ it is starting to flow well and become more natural. It is nice that zpriddy did the leg work and I can just work on the utterances.

FWIW, we’ve used the “Hey, Siri, tell House hashtag TV on” for months for the text to IFTTT method Will Poirier worked out. The “hashtag” is the only clunky part, the other feels pretty natural, probably because we use Siri for other things as well.

I suspect that conceptually if you think of House and Alexa as two different entities, the language will feel more natural.

Instead of using the Pi we need an OVA we can light up in our VMware labs :smile:

That’s definitely workable; though I wonder about the payoff.

If you have a large enough home server to run another virtual machine instance, then sure, it’s quicker and cheaper than adding a Pi or Beagle Bone or other single-purpose Linux metal.

But the amount of time to spin up a Hue Emulator in either type of environment, starting from a current base Linux installation is about the same, right?

Just takes current Java, git-clone the emulator, set a few parameters, make sure your network is properly configured, and 
 go. 
 No?

You’re absolutely correct. It’s just a matter of simplicity and options. This could also be deployed on a desktop running the free Virtualbox or paid VMware Workstation hypervisor.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Raspberry Pi. Inexpensive, lower power draw etc. but options are good.

Does anyone here use a Mac? I can’t find a data directory in with the .jar file and I’ve got duplicates in the list and not sure how to delete them.

I do but have not had a chance to play around with this one. My hope is that I’ll be able to find my Pi and play with this in the next couple days. Not real sure where I left that bad boy
 probably in some com closet or data center far far away :frowning:

Look’s like there is a Docker package. Surely there is a Docker VM image somewhere?

Docker is extremely easy to light up on an Ubuntu machine
 pretty sure I still have my docker host setup somewhere


@captain_eo had mentioned he had seen youtube videos using Echo to change Hue colors and asked how that was done since Echo itself can’t.

I’ve seen two different methods.

1.IFTTT as a “man in the middle.” Simple, clunky, but works. Use any of Echo’s IFTTT triggers to set a specific Philips event. Not super useful, but OK if there are only one or two color results you want.

  1. Ignore everything Echo can do except voice recognition. Then use Chrome to hijack Echo’s “search history” stream and feed it to something else to do device control. Note that this works best if you DON’T use Echo’s connected home feature at all. You want Echo to successfully parse the command, but then not know what to do with it.

Zach Feldman’s blog was the first place I saw this. Note that his method was released back in December 2014, several months before Echo had any device control of its own. It’s weird but powerful.

One idea would be to use or three dimmer commands back to back (each is a value from 0 to 100, so could manage Hue Saturation Brightness).

There’s lots of ways to hack the Hue Emulation
 I just added Hello Home Phrase and Mode Support yesterday afternoon (in Alpha testing
 I’ll publish soon). Did it entirely with mods to the SmartApp Endpoint; no changes required to the emulator server at all.

If we add a Virtual Color Phrase, it could store a color name to assign to the next light turned on. Voila!

Thanks, @Ron. It works - except no dimming support right? I think there has been progress in the trunk branch on this (v1.3?) and it seems like you integrated some of that, but still dimming is not supported in the raspberry branch, is it? Would be great to have dimming!

I have merged the dimming on my branch but I didn’t upgrade the smart app integration to use it. I don’t have any dimmers to test with.

Not sure how much work to upgrade the smart app because I have not looked into it.

I’ll update it to handle dimmers.

I’ve got a version in Alpha right now that does Hello Home Phrases and Modes, so might as well expand that codebase to to dimmers.

What’s the version of the Emulator branch so that I’m all synced up to start??

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This thing:


says it was merged with v0.1.3, if that it what you’re looking for

Oh - and THANKS!

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Yea that’s it.

@tgauchat If you make changes by forking send me a pull request and I will bring back into my project so others can get the change from my repo if they are already using it.

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just a clarification on the statement below - this would still require us to go to your repo and get/update the code in IDE - it wouldn’t be automagically updated like SmartTiles, correct?