Controlling Vera home automation Z-Wave controller with Amazon Echo by running an emulator on a Raspberry Pi

This is all made possible by a nifty little Java app written by armzilla. Here's a quick explanation of the setup:

Amazon EchoRaspberry PiVera Home Controller
The Echo will communicate with Phillips Hue controllers, but my setup is Vera based... what to do?Add a Raspberry Pi- the Raspberry Pi emulates the Phillips controler and transposes it to 'Vera speak'The Vera is setup with both on and off scenes for the lights that you want to control

Here are the basic steps I used:

  • The latest Raspbian has Java 8 installed, so I used that. I got the Raspbian image from the Raspberry Pi site and 'burned it' on a SD card- (I use Apple Pi Baker).
  • Next, I downloaded the Java app and dumped it in the /home/pi folder. I wrote a small bash script to make running it a little easier- this looks like this:
  • I used this method to startup the Java app on boot.
  • I created both on and off versions for all of my scenes on my Vera- scenes like room- master bed on [id: 58] and room- master bed off [id: 59] - make note of the IDs of these scenes, you' ll need these later
  • The configuration of the Java app is done using by using a RESTful API. I used a OS X based tool called Paw To do this. My commands (in text form), looked like this:The name value is the word(s) your want to use to control the Echo. The on/off IDs are at the end of the on/offUrl values
  • repeat for all scenes you want to control via your Echo. Also, you'll probably want to save these commands as I used the Forget button on the Connected Home settings screen a number of times while trying to make this work right.
  • Lastly, tell echo to discover your emulated controller. The command to do this is Alexa, discover devices
  • Once 'she' finds the devices, you can control them using the command Alexa, turn master bedroom on

This is certainly a hack, but it seems to be working OK for me over the last couple of days. It would be nice if they just played together natively.