more info on the Alexa plugin

[Steve Blethen]

It’s all good now…

After reading your other message on this subject I see you provided a link to Amazon pi product.  I will be ordering a handful of those.  In the meantime, I guess you can get back to your original priorities.  Put me on the back burner.

Thanks for everything!

-steve


> On Feb 21, 2020, at 8:35 AM, James Sentman <james at sentman.com> wrote:
> 
> So far the plugin is working for almost everybody that has tried it. I didn’t make a couple of things clear enough though so here’s some updates.
> 
> You have to change the port number in the setup to port 80. Thats the only port that will work now. If you set it up previously then you’ll have some randomish high port number in that field and it must be changed to port 80 or Alexa will refuse to find your devices. Once you change it you’ll need to disable and re-enable the interface to get it running on the new port. If you create an entirely new interface then the default will be port 80 so just leave that as it is. I could remove that setting entirely and just hard code the port to 80 but I still hold some small fragment of hope that someday Amazon will realize this was a mistake and fix it. 
> 
> The second thing is that since we are limited to just the 1 port we are also limited to just one instance of the plugin. If you had several instances running because you want to share more units than Alexa will accept from a single hub then you can only run one of them on the Mac and the others will have to be run on separate Raspberri Pi’s. This is not that bad to setup and a whole kit with a pi zero w and everything you need except the micro sd card can be had on amazon for $27. There is a good possibility that I could get it to load up on an esp8266 or esp32 based arduino board running the circuit python or micro python os’s but I haven’t experimented with that yet. The raspberry pi’s are inexpensive and I know for a fact that will work.
> 
> Let me know if you need the pi code as a solution. I have it working, but only if you start it manually. I need to make a few updates to automatically maintain the connection to XTension and for it to startup and start trying to talk to us directly. Thats not difficult I’ve just prioritized other things ahead of it for this weekend, but can try to get to it sooner if people need that.
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> James
> 
> 
> James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> XTensionList mailing list
> XTensionList at machomeautomation.com
> http://mail.machomeautomation.com/mailman/listinfo/xtensionlist