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;

Announce ReoLink Doorbell on Echo Devices

I recently installed a Reolink POE Video Doorbell, and like it a lot. Its got great picture, doesn't require web connectivity, and integrates really well with my Unraid.html">Blue Iris set up

. The only issue I have is that notifications on my mobile are poor and often missed. The bundled chime works OK inside the house, but when I'm in my detached office, I can often miss visitors.

I thought it would be nice to have the doorbell ping my office Alexa when pressed. Of course, there's a skill for that, but as someone with a penchant for Node-Red automations and too much time on my hands, a project was born....

Alexa Music Playback through Marantz / Denon Heos

Arising from a query on reddit, I revisited something I'd set up quite some time ago and forgotten all about: using Alexa to play music on my HT system. It works;

As can be seen, the processor is on CD input to start. When I ask it to play music, it switches to the HEOS input and plays. If the processor had been in standby, it would have been woken and switched to the correct input.

Also, only the music content plays through the speakers,, the Alexa responses come from the echo device itself.

Maybe the best gadget I've ever bought?

 

Fairly insidiously, Amazon has taken over my house.  I now have various iterations of FireTVs connected to each TV, and almost every room has an echo device.

I'm not complaining really, these are great pieces of technology, and voice control is a lot more useful that I would have envisaged a few years ago. 

And the FireTV is excellent - easy to use and supports everything I use on a regular basis; Netflix, Kodi, Spotify, Emby Amazon Video and more. However, there's one thing that' been bugging me -  it's lack of true bit-streaming of extended sound formats. I use Kodi quite a bit for my media library, and there are many titles in there with fancy surround formats that just don't make it out to my AV system unscathed.

This is only an issue in my Home Cinema which has a full 7.1.4 system that can make best use of such soundtracks (everywhere else is plain old stereo).

I've been reading about the nVidia Shield for a while and finally bought one to see if it could replace the FireTV in this room. Here's how I got on with it...

Total Harmony

It was getting quite ridiculous. This is the set of remotes I had built up to control my HT. From right to left; Receiver, NowTV box, PVR, FireTV, BluRay, Projector, Squeezebox, DAC.

It's little wonder no-one else in the family used the system!

In the past, I'd used various Logitech Harmony remotes but all had outlived their usefulness and have been retired. A few months ago, I'd picked up a Harmony Companion set on Amazon warehouse for a steal, but hadn't got around to configuring it all until now.

unRAID as a software dev. platform

unRaid continues to amaze.

I find myself in the middle of a spare-time software development project that quickly grew from a personal home automation idea to a quite public 'when's it ready' kind of thing. It's the development of an Alexa Skill to allow spoken commands to an Amazon Echo to control Squeezebox devices. (see Hab-Tunes.com for the project details).

Alexa, meet Squeezebox

Since my Amazon Dot arrived, I've been smitten. A little like how I didn't think I'd use a smart watch until I bought a Fossil Founder, I though voice control a gimmick until I started playing with Alexa. In the past few days I've been toying with the idea of building full Alexa control of my squeezebox based whole-house audio system. Here's what I've managed so far. It's a basic proof of concept but it does work;

This comprises a very basic LMS plug-in which links the local squeeze server software to the cloud-based skill. The skill is written using Node-RED with a mySQL database in the background.  I'm really growing to love Node-RED more and more and it seems ideal for flow-based functionality like an Alexa skill. Here's the current flow that drives the demo in the video;

There's still a long way to go but so far this is promising and a blast to put together.

Authentication for Amazon Voice Services

In an effort to have my new Echo Dot announce incoming telephone calls, I would need to have it do push notifications. Sadly, this is not yet available on the echo platform. Happily, there is a workaround via custom skills that relies on leveraging Amazon Voice Services - essentially building parts of an echo in software.

To do so, it's necessary to obtain an access token to facilitate calls to the voice services api. This is not a straightforward process - and it's just a prerequisite for the push notifications themselves. I'm logging the process here for future reference!

Securing Skills

Having got a basic setup working with an Alexa Skill calling to Node-Red on my unRaid server, I was a little worried about the security of this setup long term. I was also unhappy with going through a Lamba function to bypass the HTTPS requirement for Alexa endpoints. I decided to set up better security.

Skilling Up

In anticipation of an Amazon Echo Dot arriving, I've been looking at ways of integrating voice control into home automation. There's a certain amount that Alexa can do by herself but to really tailor things, it's necessary to build custom skills. To get these integrated with my emerging openHAB / Node-RED infrastructure, I set about setting up MediaServer8 to act as a host for the skills logic, thereby allowing me to hook sensors and devices into the skills via Node-RED. (My design objective is to run as much code and services as I can locally to minimise reliances on web services and allow everything to be glued together on my local server).

The idea was to run the core skill logic on my Node-RED install running on my unRAID server. To acheive this, I largely followed this excellent guide which required me to set up an Amazon Developer account. Alexa skills can be configured to process on either the Amazon Lambda service or on a user-defined https endpoint.