Amazon echo hook into e1.31 controller

[Railgun]

Firstly, I’m not a programming guru by any stretch of the word, but open to learning. However, in the meantime, I'll see what the real gurus here think about a possible solution.

The goal, create a bridge of some sort to allow Alexa to control lights on an e1.31 controller. Said controller is an AlphaPix variant, specially this one.

This controls some lights via software such as Nutcracker or xLights across the roof of the house for Christmas and whatever other holiday. What I would like to do is add some lights to other channels on this controller to be used elsewhere. The placement of these lights can double as year round pathway lighting given their location.

Given they’ll be somewhat separate to the roof lights, but still be RGB pixels, I’d like to be able to control these via Alexa as a simple on/off similar to how it controls Hue lights. The software mentioned above would override these for custom lighting events.

That said, I need some kind of bridge at a guess as I don’t know anything off the shelf at the moment that can interface Amazon with this kind of controller.

Has anyone played with this kind of setup?

 

[Modelworks]

The echo basically is a 'dumb' device that requires Amazon to provide the connection to in home devices. I use it to control my Dish network television system.
If I say "Alexa tune to CNN", the request goes from Alexa to Amazon where they use the program stored in the Amazon Cloud , Amazon calls these skills, then Amazon connects to my Dish satellite system through the internet and makes the channel change.

The way to implement what you want is IFTT , which is https://ifttt.com/
Install the skill in Alexa then create an app on IFTT to do what you want.

 

[Railgun]

I’d looked at IFTTT previously and unfortunately there are a couple of issues.

The first being there’s nothing that I can find that has anything to do with the protocol in question. The second, the controller has no connection to anything, thus whatever “skill” would need to be configured to talk to a particular IP/port, it’s not a “cloud” device.

...and that I think answers my question.

 

[slugg]

You can write a skill (AWS Lambda Function) that will put a message into an SMS queue. A small micro controller or Raspberry Pi can poll the queue for commands. You can use OLA (Open Lighting Architecture) to generate the e1.31 packets to send to your AlphaPix. That’s the general solution, conceptually.

Anyway, what you’ve asked is totally doable. No issue at all; you just need a little bit of engineering.

As far as the credibility of this post... I just so happen to be extremely experienced with Amazon Web Services, I write my own sequencing software for DMX-512/e1.31 devices, and I also do holiday displays/shows. I don’t use mainstream controllers and software like everyone else, though. I prefer my own most of the time. Haha!

 

[tynopik]

nvm