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Amazon Alexa Bridge

With the Alexa Bridge you can control any of your XTension units via voice control through any compatible Amazon Alexa or Echo device.

A huge thank you to Dean Davis of Afterten Software for building this add on for XTension. If you haven’t also checked out his WeatherMan app you should do so. We have a tutorial for getting all your local weather data and forecasts into XTension from that app.

Download

Download from AfterTen.com: AlexaBridge.zip

XTension Setup

Create a List in XTension named “Alexa Bridge” and drag any Units into it that you wish to expose to voice control.

Bridge Setup

Launch the Alexa Bridge program and control click on it’s icon in the dock so that you can set it to “Launch At Startup”

If the bridge program finds the List you created above the units will be shown in the program.

Alexa Setup

Using the Amazon Alexa app on your iPhone or Android device go into the settings portion of the app and start the search for new devices. Any units that you’ve dragged into the List will appear here and you can add them to your Alexa controlled devices. There seems to be a 27 device limit for Alexa control from a single hub.

Now you can make voice commands to control devices.

  • Alexa, turn on “unit name“
  • Alexa, turn off “unit name”
  • Alexa, brighten “unit name” to 50%

Notes

The app works by emulating a Phillips Hue Hub on the network. This way all traffic between Alexa and your XTension install are local. While Alexa does use the internet to decode your voice commands, your XTension units are not receiving commands from the cloud but locally from the Alexa device. Alexa has native support for the Hue Hub and so no special Alexa cloud programming is necessary.

If you are using an echo plus that has a built in ZigBee hub those devices will not be available to XTension. You can control them via the built in Alexa voice commands of course, but this program will not let you control them from XTension. If you wish those ZigBee devices to be controllable both from XTension and Alexa you’ll need a real phillips hue hub, or a Vera or other device to add them to that we support and then share them to Alexa through the bridge.

You can run this app and also have a real hue hub on your network at the same time.

The program binds to port 1901 to provide UPnP services. If you’re running other UPnP software on your mac or are otherwise using that port the program will not be able to share it’s devices.

supported_hardware/alexa.1521470239.txt.gz · Last modified: 2023/02/13 14:51 (external edit)