Does anyone know of a way or have they tried interfacing motion sensors that directly and only communicate to Alexa, such as their Echo Flex PIR Addon sensor, to be used as a trigger for a flow?
I thought up a roundabout way using the alexa remote2 nodes, where a motion detected with a routine would trigger that device to say something and likewise a no motion detected would say something else. This allows the activity to be picked up by the On Device Activity trigger node in remote2, then I go from there to do the normal motion lighting logic. But I was hoping/wondering if there was a more direct approach since my current approach has about an additional half second delay versus just Alexa routines.
Slight Update:
I managed to figure out an alternate way of handling this, using node-red-contrib-alexa-smart-home. I created a few virtual switches that would pass the motion activity data as opposed to the voice data passing that data. In my opinion, this does not solve a whole lot since I am now dependent on this node's Alexa skill and the developer's server for hosting. That being said, it does make it so that it does not have to voice randomly on motion activity and it makes it so that I can set alexa volumes per mode.
Yes, it would, but it is my understanding that that only works locally, which in my very very odd case, I am not local. I am pulling double duty on a RPi for two houses, albeit the second house, which is what I am talking about above, is only this single room.
Also when I tried node-red-contrib-amazon-echo it failed to listen on port 80, which I am guessing is because I am using DietPi which starts Node-RED using a nodered user and not root.
Yeah I am currently just using node-red-contrib-alexa-remote2 for basically everything. Does node-red-contrib-amazon-echo do everything that remote2 does in addition to adding virtual devices? I use it mostly for listening to what was said and acting based on that voice control, including device-aware, and by extension, room-aware commands.
How did you do this exactly? Just change the config inside the node or something else?
Also I am a hubitat user, so do you think there is any real advantage to use node-red-contrib-amazon-echo over a virtual hubitat device that is shared via their skill? (Not for the above situation, just in general. My primary house uses Hubitat and that house is where the RPi is)
I am running on an Android TV box, not a pie. It was simple matter of using a port forwading App. node-red-contrib-amazon-echo advantage is it is local and fast, less than a second and no skill needed. I am a Vera user, love the logic engine Reactor, But moved alot of my stuff to OpenLuup (open source vera luup engine)
Yeah I don't think I will benefit from that speed in any real way since everything I have exposed to Alexa is voice control based, which is always going to be the slowest since you can never know when it actually translates what you are saying. For any dashboard or button-based control I like keeping it inside the Hubitat ecosystem so that everything is local.
Thank you for the help regardless, I think the real issue is that Amazon does not expose it sensor data to the API and that's why these roundabout ways are necessary.
