HDMI Clearout

I recently purchased a 4x4 HDMI extender Matrix to distribute video signals around the house. (blog post to follow0. This consolidates a number of discrete devises I'd previously used and tested for this task. In retiring some of them, I took inventory of all the HDMI switches, splitters and distributors I have, and it turned out to be quite a collection, some of which were languishing totally unused.

I've listed a lot of them for sale on a reputable local classifieds site if anyone is interested. (likely best suit people in EU as otherwise import duties will apply).

Updates to announcing Reolink doorbells on Alexa

A while back, I wrote a post on how I build a Node-Red flow to allow me ask specific echo devices to announce visitors pressing my ReoLink doorbell. This worked great, but there were a couple of shortcomings; 

 

• The list of registered devices would last only as long as Node-Red was active. If I needed to restart the Node-Red docker for any reason, I would also need to re-register announcement devices. 
  
  
• The ONVIF node the flow relies on is a little flaky, and will occasionally just disappear from Node Red. 

I've added functionality to store the list of devices in a text file, so it persists between Node-Red restarts. I also added some notes on how to recover from the self-destructing ONVIF nodes, bring this all up to v1.1.1.

The device list saving is managed automatically as part of the voice registration process, but there's also a manual trigger that can be used in testing. If you use this, you might need to adjust the save and read file locations, particularly if you're not running Node-Red in a docker, like me.

The full flow is pasted below;