A project to connect an Amazon Echo Dot to my Raspberry Pi Mood Lamp. Checkout my demo here.
I wanted to get a proof of concept using voice control working, and this is what I hit on. I already had built a pimoroni mood lamp from the pimoroni kit a year or two ago, and after my roomate gave me an echo dot I decided to revisit that project. You can see the pimoroni kit here.
I used mainly this tutorial: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/rajesh3/light-control-using-arduino-and-amazon-alexa-4de729?ref=tag&ref_id=alexa&offset=8
When it comes time to launch everything, in one terminal I run the below command using python2.
sudo python alexa_server.py
Then in a seperate terminal I run the below ngrok command to open a path to that local host that the internet can reach.
./ngrok http 5000
Then I navigate to edit the skill in the Amazon developper portal, and put the ngrok endpoint into the skill. Because ngrok creates a new link each time it is run, I have to update the link each time I want to run the service. At some point I'll move to a permanent endpoint, but while I'm testing this I'm ok updating the endpoint each time I use it. https://developer.amazon.com/alexa/console/ask
I did have to create a self signed certificate for Amazon https call, but Amazon's guide helped me do that: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-skills/configure-web-service-self-signed-certificate.html
I also had some trouble running flask in python 2 and installing the packages. What helped me was updating pip
sudo python -m pip install --upgrade pip
And then after installing Flask and Flask-Ask, I had an issue with a library that I think one of its new versions isn't backwards compatible with Python 2 and some other stuff. To fix I simply downgraded that library. Azure-Samples/ms-identity-python-webapp#16 No module named 'werkzeug.contrib'
sudo python -m pip install werkzeug==0.16.0