Echo and X.10

Overview

My HA system is still based on the old, glorious X10 protocol.

Why? Well, I had around tons of X10 modules and the newer systems, like Zigbee or Zwave, are still quite expensive.

I would love to migrate on Zigbee for example, but I still have a lot of still good X10 working modules.

I hate to trash away something that still work. I have a server running Heyu that controls the lights and it handle some macros and timer. So the natural question was, is it possible to interface Alexa with my server? A quick search with google said yes!

• I found a very nice and detailed article from Corey Murnaghan : Amazon Echo X10 Home Control.

• From there actually there was a link to an update : UPDATED Amazon Echo X10 Home Control

The two articles (I strongly suggest to use the updated version) discuss about how to interface Alexa with a Raspberry Pi running Heyu.

How to make it work

I already had a server running Heyu, with the glorious Ubuntu 16.04, so I used that article as main guideline, changing things here and there and in the end, voila', everything worked just nice.

The main differences from the Corey's article were about of course the Heyu installation and setting, since I already had that done years and years ago. In the end I just installed the Ha-bridge and configured little bit differently, also because my server hosts some websites, so it was impossible to follow some suggestions like erase the /var/www/html directory.

I had to change also some ports, since I was already using the port 80.

At least my version of Echo/Alexa requires using the port 80 to recognize the Ha-bridge.

In order to have Alexa recognizing the server, I had to change the UPNP IP Address, forcing to use the one of the server. Of course I had also to modify some firewall configuration for security reasons, to make the HA system local to my network and not be accessible from outside.

But in the end, I have now a very nice and useful way to control my lights via Alexa.