Today I finally got all the pieces working to allow Alexa to control my RV lights. It turns out that the Alexa code only took a couple hours to implement, using a great tutorial posted by Kevin Utter on the developer.amazon.com site. This tutorial shows how to implement in under an hour a trivia game using Alexa. I followed the tutorial, created first a Reindeer trivia game, and then modifying it to be a Lisles Trivia game.
Once I was familiar with the process, I followed similar steps to create my own RvDuino Echo app. This app uses Alexa to listen for commands, and then forwards them to Particle.io which forwards them to a Photon Arduino.
I didn’t have to write any code on Particle.io. Code running on the Photon instructs Particle.io what commands to listen for, and which Arduino functions to run as a result. It really doesn’t get any easier than that. This has really made me a big Particle.io fan now!
I then used the Particle web IDE to write a fairly small Arduino sketch on the Photon that routes commands received from Particle.io to the desired Arduino Pro Mini over a simple RF24 network.
I’ve posted all the information and code on Github: https://github.com/rlisle/alexaParticleBridge.