Hi,
I just added a few amazon echo dots and an amazon echo plus to my house. While I tried to avoid using those for a long time now, they seem to be a pretty cool gadget for my personal home automation. The echo-plugin works great and I can control all my 433MHz outlets with pimatic via alexa voice command, which is pretty cool.
However, I am looking for a way to reverse the process and have pimatic control alexa. I know that there is no api or skill to do this out of the box, but I have read a tutorial that allows one to have a pi send emulated voice commands via an amazon remote (link to the article).
Someone mentioned in the comments that there might be an easier way but “simply” reverse engineering the commands sent by the amazon remote and then send those via a regular bluetooth transmitter. Well, I cannot reverse engineer this, so I wonder if anybody else can and possibly even has already.
Why even bother?
The amazon echo plus is able to control several devices that would usually need their own hub (for example, hue lights) out of the box. I do not have a hue hub, but I do have two hue light bulbs that work with my echo plus. If I could automate sending voice commands to alexa / my dot, I could have pimatic control those lights even without the hue hub.
For example: create rule at 8pm execute “./home/pi/start-lightbulb-1.sh” (where start-lightbulb-1.sh would trigger a connected bluetooth device to send the voice command “alexa, turn on lightbulb one” to my alexa)
Is this possible? Or does somebody know a different way to control alexa? All together, the echos / alexa works fine. But since it is capable to act as a hub for certain devices, which I’d like to control -but do not have the actual hub for- it’d be so convenient to somehow direct commands to alexa with pimatic.
Cheers