Messages

Langston,
This is incredibly exciting news for the project. I have been using Alexa and IFTTT with Vera as a Beta tester and love it. After recently shifting all my zwave back to LMCE I'm excited by the possibility of using Alexa again with my setup.

How could I as an end user do to help you bring this on? Contribute to hosting/ SSL costs??

Awesome work
Garath

I too desire to switch my zwave back to linuxmce from smartthings.
i suppose i could setup some donation process if people wanted to help out with that
right now there is a bit of a technical hurdle to get all the packages needed in place, im working on that.
Unless you know how to get packages in place for linuxmce, its really just admin work that needs to be done to make the needed upgrades on the core.

-Langston
-Langston

Been running this for a while now, all seems to be going well.

Going to try and push this week to get it packaged up.


-Langston

Many apologies I've been off the scene for a long while with work commitments and also my old system died a few months back, but I've now begun to start back up.
Ive got a nice fast new server now up and running with multiple vmware virtual machines, I have a few bugs one with passing through my zwave dongle and the other with the dhcp server not giving out addresses which is weird but anyway I'm getting there.

So anyway before I left I had Alexa controlling my lights as well as scenarios/scenes and devices like my boiler for heating and hot water, it was fairly reliable and the Oauth2 part is simple to use once setup and not an issue using just plan old PHP it just needs a few tables set up in the database and the code pushed in to the web admin pages.
The main problem was that it wasn't really usable for end users as Amazon requires Oauth2 handshaking with a server in order to use the home skill kit and Amazon are very picky on the SSL certificates that you can use, I brought 4 from various budget companies like godaddy and none of them would work, so in the end I had to route the requests through a web server I have access to at work which has a high end corporate certificate.

You don't need oAuth with a custom skill however and i actually did a presentation with work before xmas where I created a custom skill to ask for company information and send the latest reports to users and things just as a sort of demo of whats possible so I may look at going down this route next.
The down side though is you would then have to use an activation word each time like "ask Linuxmce to set living room lights to 30%" but the up side is we should be able to do something like "ask Linuxmce to play Xmen in Living room" and control media which would be cool.

Anyway as soon as i get my lights working again through the normal means ill get back on the Alexa piece and see if i can help out

Would love to work with you on this.

So far i have
Cloud:
SSL enabled cloud router with oauth authentication going.
Site with user login, no profile besides showing what is linked, ability to set location with nickname (no multi-location support yet)
Note that im open to sharing the cloud code with other developers since it is a box that connects to your house.

Amazon
Alexa smarthome integration app so you can say commands minus 'ask linuxmce' (lighting is only thing implemented now
Custom Alexa skill for media, so far video media is working

Cakephp used in cloud and on linuxmce. I dont like frameworks, but now that ive figured it out, the same code can be reused for multiple api's eg google and iftt.

Remaining before beta testing:
Implement oauth server on core, oauth client in cloud server so core can only be accessed with access token via those apis. Ive done this before, just requires some hours. I should have done it today but the promise of launching Frozen on the media director via lmce was too much of a pull

*Lots of testing

Both sites (cloud and core)
running php 7.2
Using Cakephp3 framework for api and user management in cloud, api on the core. It actually integrates moderately well with the existing DB, so no new user authentication mechanisms are needed.
-OAuth2 server security component https://github.com/uafrica/oauth-server
-OAuth client security component implemented in the cloud will be an updated variant of https://bshaffer.github.io/oauth2-server-php-docs/cookbook/

New db tables are needed on the core, but they are actually installed by a cakeplugin so....yeah we will need to see how that goes. i took the plunge myself, and have not seen any adverse effects on my core db wise.

-langston

does anyone know if the other code ever got checked in?

mine is here https://git.linuxmce.org/linuxmce/linuxmce/tree/master/web/lmce-api

i went with cakephp because i can easily provide amazon, google home integration from the same framework. Really anything else that comes along requiring an oauth endpoint.

and now dimming and media scenarios 

has there been any progress on this?

Yes there has. Alexa now can control my lights (basic on/off)
some kinks to work out connecting securely back to the core. still working but its far past prototype with endpoints that can support google home too.

now i just have to convince phenigma to upgrade us to php7 . . .

You can go that route. You will have whatever interface the application uses that you start, plus the ability to use the "mouse" control via Orbiter.

What would be nicer would be a real device template, which would talk to kodi's XML interface, send commands from buttons on your Orbiter remote. But that is much more work.

i have the code in a qt application i wrote im willing to hand over. But in being honest, i dont have time to really put into developing it fully.
It talks to kodi / xbmc over their http/json interface.

has there been any progress on this?

Hi To all,

Any updates on this?, have any of you had problems with the play and pause buttons?.  Pause works ok but if I press play is the same as stop!.  I cannot power up or down any MD from the power menu from this orbiter.

Cheers,

T

Can you describe the play / pause problem in more detail? im not seeing that issue.
I never wired those (md on/off) functions in. is there an open ticket?

-golgoj4

So is there any clear way to fix this or just guess until something works?

Been stuck for over a week trying to install lmce again. close to giving up at this point.

ouch, that does suck

Im running it on a rooted pixel-c tablet and unrooted pixel-xl phone without issue.


hth
Langston

link to code?

High Level observations after working with google, smartthings

*Does every lmce box now support https connections?
*We cannot do this for only one service. We must develop a linuxmce web api. period! The upside is all these cloud connected services can utilize this one api, so we only have to do it the one time. Until they invent the next thing besides json...

My showstopper: user credentials. If you think about it for a second, we would basically be storing very sensitive account information for multiple services for a multi-tude of people. That makes users a very juicy target, plus we need to respect privacy between users. Im sure people know how to do this, I dont have much experience there but im confident as a group we could figure it out. kids shouldn't be able to sneak into the parents google account via linuxmce db diving, etc.

Ive settled on using cakephp in addition to webadmin. I know most people would think that this is something that would be rolled into the webadmin, but frankly the webadmin is big, ugly and it doesn't make sense from my standpoint to tack on a massive feature like this. cakephp would be able to  integrate into our existing database with some work but it provides a nice clean framework to provide a gui frontend if we choose, but a json api next to it from the same codebase.

I should also add that a c++ adapter would be in the mix purely for passing event into the linuxmce system (unless something better already exists) for sending events / anything else not directly connected to web api.

Kudos to you guys for also attacking this!

golgoj4

Did you mark the files as TV shows (as a subtype)

thanks for point this out.