As you may have seen I have the Amazon Echo at home. I liked the potential to make the echo the hub for home automation. The first step is to get something you can control so I set out to find something that works with Alexa natively so there would be no issues with integration. I searched Amazon for the a switchable plug that I could plug my living room light in to. I found the TP-LINK HS100.
This is a wifi enabled smart plug. You plug it in and from an Android app set it up on your wi-fi network. Once it’s set up you just ask Alexa to look for new devices and it will find the smart plug. Through the set up you designate a name for the device so now you can say something like “Alexa turn on the living room light” and it will switch it on and say “OK”. This is cool and how I work my living room light today. Of course the light is just one thing you can turn any item on that is plugged in to the smart plug. It is just a simple way to power on and power off. This is the beginning of automating the home of course, the smart plug is about $30 so this could be an expensive way to avoid turning a light switch. I will admit that I got mine a lot cheaper than that, it was on sale and I had a gift card from a survey so I ended up paying about $4 out of pocket. Since we have had that light operated by Alexa we have wished that we had one for the bedroom light so that it would be on when we go upstairs. Now imagine, instead of saying “Alexa turn off the living room light” at the end of the day we could say “Alexa its bed time” and have her turn off the living room light, turn off the tv and the tuner, turn on the bedroom light, set the alarm, check the garage door is closed, and start the sounds of the sea music. – Well, this is possible if you introduce something like Openhab. What is this you ask, here’s a brief description of Openhab