Indigo / Node-Red / Alexa

haha.. judging by the domain and the hours he keeps on Slack, I think he is UK based, so hence the focus on C. If you go to the Slack support group, he may well fix that pretty quickly.

Glad its now working for you. Interestingly I was going to switch to use MQTT for my temp values as hadnt got the get device to work before, but now see its on pull request, so hence the inject tool at the start for debugging so think I am leaving it as it is.

ETA: Nevermind......it seems to have resolved itself.

I've read the entire thread here, but am still perplexed on how to get node-red to do what I need it to do.

I have installed and configured node-red. I am using the full skill (vs. just emulating a hue hub). I started with the hard part and took on my ceiling fan which I have working via Alexa commands (.e.g., "Alexa set bedroom fan 45%") now. So I know I have the basics all connected.

I would like to be able to ask Alexa "What's the bedroom temperature?" and have it tell me the temp of my Fibaro Eye. She tells me the temp is 22. There are two issues with this:
1. According to Indigo, it's actually 26C, not 22C
2. I'd like it in F (so I checked F in the device setup, but it says it's 71.6F which equates to 22C

So any ideas why I am getting the wrong reading?

FYI, here's my flow with the associated settings:

Regardless of the C or F setting on the device setup, Alexa will read the temperature using the scale that is set in your Amazon device settings. Can you confirm that your Amazon device is set to Fahrenheit? By the way, the Fahrenheit setting bug I reported earlier (setting not saved on red.cb-net.co.uk) has been fixed.

In terms of the incorrect temperature reading, I believe that 22 degrees is the default, which likely means that your setup is not working. Have you tried simply restarting node-red? I got as far as you did and could not get it to work, but a restart did the trick.

I have an IR Repeater (ZXT-120) that I use to control a air conditioner system; is there a way to control it using node-red?

I have an IR Repeater (ZXT-120) that I use to control a air conditioner system; is there a way to control it using node-red?

If it's already controllable with indigo, I'm sure you can use node-red to control it.

Some things are pretty straight forward. Add an Alexa node, add an indigo node and drag a line between the two and hit "Deploy". Some devices take a little more work...

If you already have it configured in indigo as a thermostat device, then you should only have to create a thermostat device on your https://red.cb-net.co.uk/devices account, ask Alexa to discover it. Now on node-red when you add an "Alexa Smart Home V3" node, you can select the device from your Alexa account. Drag the "Indigo Set Device" node to the flow, connect a line between the two and start testing.

With all experimenting, I put a "Debug" node next to everything to watch the msg.payload go through the flow, see if it stops somewhere, etc.

One tip.... When you add a new Alexa node to the flow, play with giving it commands before attaching the node to anything and just watch the "Debug" node. This will tell you what commands the device recognizes and what that device node puts out as a message. If it is a direct translation, like a light node (On/Off), then no interpretation is needed. Sometimes you may need to add a switch, or something to change the message payload to something that indigo recognizes.

I hope that helps a bit.

I have an IR Repeater (ZXT-120) that I use to control a air conditioner system; is there a way to control it using node-red?

If it's already controllable with indigo, I'm sure you can use node-red to control it.

Some things are pretty straight forward. Add an Alexa node, add an indigo node and drag a line between the two and hit "Deploy". Some devices take a little more work...

If you already have it configured in indigo as a thermostat device, then you should only have to create a thermostat device on your https://red.cb-net.co.uk/devices account, ask Alexa to discover it. Now on node-red when you add an "Alexa Smart Home V3" node, you can select the device from your Alexa account. Drag the "Indigo Set Device" node to the flow, connect a line between the two and start testing.

Yes, this is what I normally do; I already have 30+ devices configured in Alexa with node-red

With all experimenting, I put a "Debug" node next to everything to watch the msg.payload go through the flow, see if it stops somewhere, etc.

One tip.... When you add a new Alexa node to the flow, play with giving it commands before attaching the node to anything and just watch the "Debug" node. This will tell you what commands the device recognizes and what that device node puts out as a message. If it is a direct translation, like a light node (On/Off), then no interpretation is needed. Sometimes you may need to add a switch, or something to change the message payload to something that indigo recognizes.

I hope that helps a bit.

Thanks
I will give it a try.

Marco

I'm trying to get a simple temperature sensor setup, so I can ask "Alexa, what's the temperature in Home Garage?". I followed the various instructions in this thread, and using the echo-hub & echo-device, I can control lighting. For this one, I'm trying to use the Alexa skill node(s). I have the following flow:



I've registered an account at red.cb-net.co.uk, and created a temperature device there called "Home Garage". When I ask "Alexa, what's the temperature in House Garage?", I get a cached response. By that, I mean when I ask that, I get no debug output from the debug node attached to the 1st Home Garage node. The flow doesn't query Indigo, but instead returns the last known temperature state.

If I replace the 1st Home Garage node in the flow with an Inject node, and click the inject button, Indigo is queried, and the Alexa state is updated. The next time I ask, it will return the correct temperature, until it's stale again. I'm very new to Alexa skills and Node-RED, but I would think that in my flow above, I should be seeing debug messages coming from the 1st "Home Garage" node when asking Alexa (and thereby starting the flow so the state is updated). Am I correct in this assumption, and if so, what am I missing? I've tried restarting node-red to no avail.

Thanks for any and all insight!

-pc

Hi, You are almost there. You need to force Node-Red to poll your Indigo device. So change the first item to an inject node.

Screenshot 2020-11-16 at 14.48.26.png (72.07 KiB) Viewed 3853 times

Then set it up to repeat.

Screenshot 2020-11-16 at 14.48.39.png (103.43 KiB) Viewed 3853 times

And I use this format for output back to Alexa

Screenshot 2020-11-16 at 14.49.04.png (94.73 KiB) Viewed 3853 times

I think I read there is a limit on how often Alexa can have updates pushed to it, so dont go crazy with refreshing it, or ask on red-cb slack support channel .

Thanks siclark, At one point, I had it setup that way, with a repeating injection node, but I didn't think it looked right. If I may ask, do you know the purpose of the alexa-smart-home-v3 node (the first "Home Garage" node in my flow)? I would have thought that asking a question of the device would start the flow, thus only updating the state when asked, as opposed to every minute of every day. But that does not appear to be the case. When would that type of node get used - and is there a way to only update the state when asked?

Thanks,
-pb

I think I assumed the same but also didn’t get it to work.
The dev is active on his slack channel so you could ask there

Simon

Actually, I think I have seen the request from Alexa work to update the temperature from indigo on the flow, but the problem is that node red returns the immediate temperature, then it gets updated. So I had to ask twice to get the updated temperature.

Hi,

When doing this in Home-Assistant with the node-red plugin, i'm getting this error, does anyone have any idea?

See image attached.

Looking for help. Have had node-red, alexa and indigo working for many months. now Alexa doesn't discover any node-red / indigo devices. I'm running node-red as root user but I don't think the discovery process can 'see' the node-red devices or controller.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Can you check that the node red skill is enabled. Might be worth disabling or removing them adding again and seeing if that discovers the devices

I think I need to upgrade my Echo, gen 1 Echo show. Unplugged it and restarted and it found the node-red devices.