Question

Okie doke.  I’m interested in querying device state from Alexa and maybe my PC or Raspberry Pi.Okie doke. I’m interested in querying device state from Alexa and maybe my PC or Raspberry Pi. Anyone have any pointers for me? I could use Amazon or ST.  

Answer 1

Home Assistant is open source and they have Alexa components you could examine

Answer 2

Not all devices support being queried just so you know

Comments

@mariandi56178 I guess that makes sense, but many of the zwave/Zigbee devices are constantly sending or responding to state requests as seen via ST live logging. I was heading down the road of pushing logs to Splunk. There are a few SmartApps that use native ST SDK functionality to do that.  

---

If you look at Home Assistant they have a good list of stuff that tells you if it's Local/Cloud Push/Polling

---

@mariandi56178 I’m in deep with ST. I was over complicating it. An API request can get a device’s status, so I’m off to the races.  

Answer 3

I can show you how to get Alexa to fully control your PC and any PC software, mouse moves, menu selections, video etc. So potentially you could control other devices directly from the PC across your local network removing many of them from the cloud.  

Comments

@secrest I think I’m heading into Alexa skills territory now that I have full control of device state from the PC. Not sure if I want to give Alexa rights to “sit at the keyboard”, but I would still like to ask “Alexa, what is the status of x? ”