One of the longtime Homeseer users / plugin authors (UltraJones - Randy) reposted the
Vera mechanism of chit chatting with Amazon Echo emulating the amazon-echo-ha-bridge a few weeks back (well months) on the Homeseer forum.
Initially he tested this on a Wintel 7 box then a Rasberry Pi. (note this will work on Linux, Wintel or Mac at the time of this post writing).
Personally been neglecting Alexa and for whatever reason the Amazon Echo answered a question I didn't ask it sometime last week. Decided to the try the posted integration of the Amazon Echo and Homeseer 3 this week.
Here goofing around configured it on my RPi2 Homeseer 3 (lite) automation box. It works fine. This is the beginnings of an Echo to Homeseer plugin. I tried it yesterday and it works. BTW can trigger anything configured that is running on Homeseer 3 this way. Going baby steps with Homeseer 3 and currently running two HS3 boxes; one on the RPi2 - HS3 lite and one on the Intel Haswell iSeries computer - Ubuntu 64bit. Here I only tested it on the RPi2 for the time bean.
Relating the music thing / streaming / Kodi STBs - this enables the integration indirectly using Homeseer 3 plugins that work fine. (IE: somebody else has already integrated the Amazon Echo with their Kodi box and it appears to work fine).
Here are the steps (note that I am doing a copy and paste from this
post.)
This is relating to what I did using Homeseer 3. Note too I skipped a few steps here as Java was already on my RPi2. Note the below relates to testing. I have configured the jar file to run automatically with a reboot of HS3 and created a link in HS3 to do the configurations. Note that is easy peasy. Start by enabling the Homeseer 3
Enable control using JSON checkbox under setup. BTW still in learning mode with Homeseer 3 boxes (running Homeseer 2 on two boxes - production wise).
1 - Download amazon-echo-bridge-0.1.3.jar from
here.
2 - I made an Echo directory on the root drive of the RPi2 - calling it /echo and copied over the jar file mentioned in #1
3 - SSH'd over to the RPi2 and ran this command. (note that x.x.x.x is the IP of my RPi2)
java -jar -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true amazon-echo-bridge-0.1.3.jar --logging.level.com.armzilla.ha.upnp=DEBUG --logging.file=ha.log --upnp.config.address=x.x.x.x >log.txt
3 - After the program starts just go to a the following: hxxp://x.x.x.x:8080/configurator.html
4 - You will see the following unconfigured web page.
5 - Under Bridge Server, change "localhost" to the IP address of the system running the amazon-echo-bridge. Please note, this setting keeps changing back to localhost, so you'll need to make sure you check it before adding your lights.
6 - Under Name, enter the name of the lighting you want to control (e.g. Family Room Lights).
7 - Enter the HS3 JSON command for the On URL and Off URL. You should test this in a browser before entering the commands.
8 - Here is an example for one device configured in Homeseer 3. Values come from the HS3 variable configuration. Just manually turn on and off device to get values. Note that this works with any defined variable in Homeseer 3.
On URL: hxxp://x.x.x.x/JSON?request=controldevicebyvalue&ref=20&value=0
Off URL: hxxp://x.x.x.x/JSON?request=controldevicebyvalue&ref=20&value=99
9 - This is what the configuration page looks like with one defined variable.
10 - Click Add Device to add the device.
11 - Now, ask Alexa to discover devices (e.g. "Alexa, discover devices"). After about 20 seconds, Alexa should indicate she was able to find the devices you just added.
12 - You can check out your stuff over here.
hxxp://echo.amazon.com/spa/index.html#settings/connected-home
Here I just went to the GUI and had it search for devices. The Amazon Echo Ap GUI discovered my devices in less than 20 seconds. Easy peasy plug n play.
) is the ability to say something from half way across my house and it understands me. And all that in a little package, no PC required. It is also nice that Amazon is being open about it, unlike Apple, MS, or Google. The way they are doing things has some drawbacks, but it seems pretty secure. They require SSL and both valid public client and server certs to communicate. 
