Stuart England Posted January 4, 2017 Share Posted January 4, 2017 Evening all, I spent some time today setting up ha-bridge https://github.com/bwssytems/ha-bridge/ to emulate HTTP get/put/post commands as Philips Hue Devices and this worked really well, I am running it from a Docker container on my Synology NAS. Alexa scanned for new devices and fired off HTTP commands based on on/off voice commands to the device that was discovered. The next step is to install Ryan's Web Events driver and turn HTTP commands into Control4 events and ultimately have Alex fire off C4 events without the need for IFTT / Pushover etc. So, the reason for my post is I am wondering where this will land me in relation to the native C4 Alexa driver? We dont have the C4 skill yet here in the UK but I have previously managed to hack my way around this by standing up a AWS EC2 instance in the US and creating a new Amazon account from there and managed to load the C4 skill.. unfortunately I have lost that ability now and its a lot of effort to go though that all again. Anywho... I am wondering, it it worth me doing all this? how will this compare to the native driver when available? when is the native driver available in the UK? I might do it anyway, just as something to do / learn / experience but I dont like having to have this middle man ha-bridge box running as its just another component that could go wrong. Thanks in advance Stu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stuart England Posted January 4, 2017 Author Share Posted January 4, 2017 ok, so I have completed this mini-project and wow does it work well.. time will tell if its reliable Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
South Africa C4 user Posted January 12, 2017 Share Posted January 12, 2017 How quick are your repsonse times? I have anything from a half second (no problem) to 5 second delay (not cool) on the native C4 driver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stuart England Posted January 12, 2017 Author Share Posted January 12, 2017 Its very quick, I was using Alan's IFTT driver previously which I would imagine is similar in speeds to the native driver and this is definitely faster - usually the action is finished before Alexa says "ok" I have been playing around with Homebridge and Siri and this is even faster, Siri is just so much more slick than Alexa and using @Joshua Pressnell driver which provides feedback you can ask more intelligent questions like "Siri, what lights are on?" and its less prescriptive than Alexa so you can use slight variations of words.. for example I if I say Dining Room or Dining Area Siri seems to understand but with Alexa it HAS to be "Dining" and if I include any other words she doesn't know what Im talking about. IMO: homebridge+siri > ha-bridge+alexa Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zaphod Posted January 14, 2017 Share Posted January 14, 2017 I do something similar using an RPi as my bridge. So far I have used it for applications like interfacing with my Tesla Model S and turning on/off lights that have a wifi controller. That is all done using the chow main http driver to do a HTTP command. Why not not install the third party Alexa driver? That's what I use here in Canada. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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