Smart Home – Control OpenHab devices with Alexa
At home, I use OpenHab to control my smart home devices. Until some months, we used only the mobile apps from OpenHab to control the smart home devices.
Because most of our rooms have an Amazon Echo device installed, I was wondering, if I could use the smart home features of Alexa. I found ha-bridge, which I used to control the smart home devices from Homematic directly (without OpenHab). ha-bridge emulates a Philips Hue Gateway, which the Echo/Alexa system can find and integrate into its smart home control.
Because I started now to integrate ZigBee based smart home devices into our home, I needed to find another solution, because ha-bridge could not be used to control the ZigBee devices. I thought…and was wrong.
ha-bridge has the ability to integrate OpenHab devices. On the webpage of your ha-bridge instance, open „Bridge Control“.
Scroll down until you see the entry „OpenHAB Names and IP Addresses“
Enter here a name for your OpenHab instance, its ip address, port and credentials, if needed. After entering all values, scroll up and press „Save“.
After a short time, you should see after a refresh „OpenHAB Devices“. If open this page, you should see all devices, which are configured in OpenHab.
With „Build Item“ you can create the entry for the „Bridge Devices“ list, which is then made available over the Philips Hue emulation.