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.

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.

The Grand Plan

Welcome to Mediaserver8, a place where I document my adventures in home automation and media serving - mostly for my own reference and future sanity!

I'm going to keep this post on top and maintain the overview schematic at Gliffy to offer an introduction to my HA system as it evolves. (Here's a direct link to a scalable version of this diagram).

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Read on for a detailed breakdown of this setup...

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.