In a previous post you’ve learned how to control your X10 devices using the Amazon Echo and the IFTTT service. But now Amazon allows you to code a Smart Home Skill so you can say Alexa turn on the lights instead of Alexa trigger lights on. It’s more convenient! Let’s extend the work we’ve already done to write a Smart Home Skill to natively manage your X10 devices.
Are you one of those Amazon Echo users that have the house full of X10 devices and you’re sad you can’t use them with the Echo? There’s a way you can control them if you have a Linux server around, even if it’s something as simple and cheap like a Raspberry Pi!
If you want to implement your own Alexa Skills for your Amazon Echo and don’t intend to make them public, you can use a self-signed certificate for your web service where you host the skill.
I’ve been impressed on how many developers can’t make this work and have opted to use a Lambda function as a proxy, when it is very easy to create the self-signed certificate.
If you intend to publish your skill then you’d need to buy a SSL Certificate. These steps won’t help you. You also need a real and trusted SSL Certificate if you want to host audio files to be used with the Audio SSML Tag.