Alexa controlling Home Assistant

There have been some different ways in order for your Alexa to control your home.  Some are quite complicated and require some coding. Some are very easy but somehow limited. I wanted to share how to use the Node Red skill in Amazon in order to control just anything.

In order to make this work you will need:

Amazon Alexa

Home Assistant

Node Red

I have made some other post how to set this up in Docker.

We will use the Node Red skill but there are other ways as well to let Alexa control your smart home. The main difference is that the Node Red skill will be able to control just about anything. Some of them are:

Ikea

Hue

Home Assistant

Node Red

I would encourage you to use the Home Assistant skill to support the HA project. It is a paid service that costs 5$ / month. I have tried it but decided to use the Node Red instead.

So start by enabling the Node Red skill in alexa.amazon.com.  After this create an account. You can read more of the the docs here. Link the account in the skill at amazon.

Next thing is to create a simple device. I have chosen light. It may be a little bit confusing here but what you do is actually to tell Alexa and the skill what kind of settings your device have. Name the device to something smart. Open your alexa app and go to settings and devices. Scan for new and hopefully the new device should appear.

As you can see below the device has the same settings as the one we set in the skill bridge. You may want to create some switches as well with on/off actions.

Now open up Node Red. Go to palettes and install the alexa node. Again I refer to the docs that are very detailed.

Add the Alexa node to a new flow. In the pull down meny your new device should show up.

In the data filed of turn on/off I have used the entity from HA.

{"entity_id":"switch.roof_kitchen_switch" }

And in the 20% dim I have used

{"entity_id":"light.roof_kitchen_level", "brightness": 20 }

The switch is configured as below. The Alexa node send true or false for an/ff and the value 20. I could add more values here as well as 40,60 and 80.

The last thing to make all this work is to open your alexa app and create a routine. Create something and choose smart home. Set the device to whatever you want that is configured in Node Red.

This is just a very simple example to get you started. You could do almost anything with node red and now controll all your Home Assistant devices. Or use the build in features in Alexa to interact with Node Red.