My favorite node is being killed by Amazon on November 1

Third party integrations Node-RED
1

Amazon is shutting down the Alexa Skill used by the Alexa-Home-Skill node by Ben Hardill on November 1.
It was a great node and was dirt-simple to add any Alexa device to Node Red, even nonexistent pseudo devices.

Other options:
The Alexa Local node needs a token refreshed at random, sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. Until then the node doesn’t work, and you don’t know about it until things stop working and you have to open the Node Red dashboard to see the error message.

The node-red-contrib-alexa-remote2 nodes haven’t seen any updates in five years- do they even work? (The instructions are somewhat cryptic).

So, does anyone have any alternatives or is NabuCasa my only option now?

2

Maybe Matter is an option.

3

You have got to be kidding.
Trying to be funny?
Many of my devices are homebrew using ESP modules. Many others are virtual devices- no hardware exists.

That was the beauty of the Alexa-Home-Skill node. I could literally connect anything to Alexa.

4

I don’t have an Alexa and it surely must be frustrating. It seems Alexa does support Matter, so would some kind of bridge not work? I don’t know if one exists, but perhaps something to look for.

5

Tell me how to insert Matter into my ESP devices?
How do I add Matter to a virtual device that has no associated hardware?

I have a virtual device named “theater”. When I tell Alexa to “turn on theater” my Node Red flow turns off the kitchen and dining room lights, turns on the family room lights at 25% and turns on the TV. There is no device named “theater”.

If there is any way to create a virtual device using Matter, I would be genuinely surprised.

6

A bridge normally means that it translates from one standard to another I didn’t say hub, and I didn’t pretend to have the answer.

Good luck.

7

Yes… there’s an option, but you’re going to have to go the extra mile and build the skill yourself.

8

I have been successfully using this addon for about three months now: home-assistant-matter-hub. It works with any entity type listed here.

It is sometimes buggy (e.g devices get added twice with only one working) but that only happened to me once…
There is no additional cost, no cloud service (except that Alexa itself already is a cloud service) and no additional hardware required.
The only requirement is that your HA has to be im the same network as one of your Alexa devices.

1 Like
9

I am not kidding.
I do not know Alexa and I not really sure what you want, but Ha have the option to share its devices as Matter devices to a Matter fabric, even devices that are not Matter.
Maybe Alexa can do that too.

10

Exactly, it’s matter, but the other way around than you’d think.
Set up matter hub linked above, and expose your entities to it. Easiest is to create “Alexa” label, assign it to entities you want to expose, and tell Matter Hub to look for “Alexa” label. Then, connect your echo/alexa to this created matter network via generated QR code. And now you have all your exposed entities in Alexa. With added benefit that it goes directly to Alexa, without the additional cloud hop when using HA Cloud or any other Alexa skill…

11

In other words its local without need to open any ports in the router.

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12

If you go the Alexa Smart Home custom skill route, you’ll use the least amount of resources (RAM, HD space, etc) on your hardware.

There’s also an option using Emulated Hue, but every device you push through it will show up as a lightbulb in Alexa.

The Matter Hub add-on is a really good option, too, but will use more resources on your hardware.

I built the Alexa Smart Home Skill years ago and it’s been rock solid for me. You define what devices you want to appear in Alexa by using the “alexa:” integration in your configuration.yaml file. Though, you won’t have the functionality to create ghost devices like in Node Red’s skill, you can just create helpers (input_booleans) in HA to replicate the functionality.

13

I haven’t considered Matter since I don’t have any Matter devices in my home. (I looked at the price of a smart Matter switch and decided it wasn’t worth the extra cost).

Considering the addon, I have about two-dozen addons installed and I have never seen so many warnings in the instructions.
warning
This indicates to me that Matter is still a protocol not ready for primetime.

But, I’ll consider it.

But, will I be able to use any of the nine Alexa Echo devices in my house?

14

Hi,

I use emulated hue to expose for example boolean switches to Alexa.
This way I can create a routine in the Alexa app and say what I want to say and then switch what I want to switch via a HA automation using the boolean as trigger.

In my configuration.yaml I added;

emulated_hue:
  host_ip: 192.168.XX.XX
  listen_port: 80
  off_maps_to_on_domains:
    - script
    - scene
  expose_by_default: true
  exposed_domains:
    - input_boolean
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15

Yes, you can use any of them as long as at least one of them is on the same network as your HA…

16

Hi,
I am not a software guy and only recently starting using Home Assistant with the Alexa-Home-Skill node by Ben Hardill.
Isn’t there a way for another programmer to look at this and modify so the skill keeps working? If I was a programmer, I would try but I am a mechanical engineer which doesn’t help much in this situation. Would someone need permission from Ben Hardill to modify his code to keep it functioning?

17

Nope:

hard
hard902×210 26.6 KB

The biggest obstacle is navigating the byzantine requirements of AWS.

18

There are two different skills that work with Node-RED. As far as I know, both are by Ben Hardill.

One is “Node-RED”
(Ben Hardill, uses node-red-contrib-alexa-home-skill in Node-RED, https://alexa-node-red.bm.hardill.me.uk/),

the other is “Node-RED Smart Home Control”
(cb-net, node-red-contrib-alexa-smart-home
in Node-RED, https://red.cb-net.co.uk/).

Only the first is discontinued, if I understand correctly.

The second is the more modern version with more functionality. I think it should still work.

It’s relatively easy to transfer devices from the old version to the new one, but you have to do it for each device individually.

I use both skills with Node-RED together with iobroker, but it shouldn’t make any difference for HA.

Update:
Ok, the second one is a fork from hardillb by coldfire84.

19

Hi
Ben Hardill is working hard on it :
https://github.com/hardillb/node-red-alexa-home-skill-web/issues/192
I think a solution will be found…

1 Like
20

Seems like per the posts it may have been fixed.

Which is currently considered the better route to go with (stable, feature complete, etc)?

https://red.cb-net.co.uk or https://alexa-node-red.bm.hardill.me.uk