node-red-contrib-wemo-emulator

NOTE if you're upgrading from a version prior to 1.0.0, it is recommended that you get Alexa to forget all devices and rediscover. This is due to the fix to prevent duplicated wemo-emulator devices appearing in the Alexa app.

Why might you want to emulate Wemo? Well I wanted to be able to control my Node-RED Raspberry Pi using my Amazon Echo. The Echo has Wemo support built in so I thought I'd give it a try.

It's pretty cool to be able to say 'Alexa, turn my garden watering system on' and my Pi turns on the outdoor watering system.

This Node-RED node is only a slim wrapper around the marvellous wemore Wemo library written by Daniel Leong.

Installation

Change directory to your node red installation:

$ npm install node-red-contrib-wemo-emulator

Configuration

Drag the node on to your workspace, configure it as below and then ask Alexa to discover devices.

| Config | Description | | --------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Node Name | This is the name of the node as it appears in the Node-RED workspace | | Friendly Name | This is the name that you'll see in the list of devices known to Alexa, it's also the name that you use in voice commands | | Unique ID | This ID should be unique across all the wemo-emulator nodes in your workspace | | Port | Wemore can automatically select a port to listen on, but it is recommended that you enter a unique port and increment it for each wemo emulator node you add to your workspace. This ensures that the port never changes. | | On Topic | This is the topic sent when you ask Alexa to turn your thing on | | On Payload | This is the payload sent when you ask Alexa to turn your thing on | | Off Topic | This is the topic sent when you ask Alexa to turn your thing off | | Off Payload | This is the payload sent when you ask Alexa to turn your thing off |

Troubleshooting

If Alexa can't discover the devices emulated by this node, please check you don't have a firewall blocking the following ports:

• 1900/udp
• You must also open the ports for all of the wemo emulator nodes configured

Enabling extra debugging

Install node-red-contrib-config and drag a config node into your workspace. Configure the node to set a global variable called wemo-emulator with a JSON value of {"debug": true}. Also make sure that the config tickbox for active is unchecked. Redeploy. Now click the button on the config node. This will trigger all instances of wemo-emulator to write extra logging to the os syslog next time they're invoked.

Experimental

The node-red msg object now contains a sender object which attempts to identify the echo which was spoken to. This is still under scrutiny and may or may not work for you.