How to Use Alexa & Raspberry Pi switch things wirelessly?

Question

I wanted to use my Amazon Echo Dot to connect to my Raspberry Pi, and have it turn on switches wirelessly.

What I have done: I have been able to use Makermusings's Fauxmo and a relay board to "trick" Alexa to think that the Raspberry Pi is a Wemo device, and switch things on and off. However, that limits one to set all of the desired devices around a single area that is close to the Raspberry Pi.

I wanted to do the following:

1. Say command: "Alexa, turn on lamp"
2. Alexa sends command to Raspberry Pi through Fauxmo
3. Raspberry Pi turns on a switch far away that may be in the kitchen, but would use some sort of wireless switch

Question: How can I control a switch wirelessly through Alexa/Raspberry Pi?

Answer 1

• Buy sonoff switches
• Flash with MQTT firmware (https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota)
• Add to wifi
• Send MQTT messages from the Pi to control the switch

You can also use something like Node-RED (comes pre installed in raspbian) and the node-red-contrib-alexa-home-skill (I wrote this node) to send the messages and have more control than just the actions that Wemo supports.