Alexa with particle

[developer]

I want to know how can we make particle photon discoverable for Alexa Skills?
I have created a smart home skill for particle photon and logged in with the credentials of which the photon is registered but still i am not able to discover or connect photon with alexa. Alexa just scans for 20 seconds or so but does not connect with the photon

[Moors7]

There are various topics discussing this, so give the search button a shot

[developer]

do i have to put particle in pairing mode?

[Moors7]

Have you seen this topic?

Alexa Smart Home Skill for Particle Devices

Many thanks to @harrisonhjones, @jeiden and @Dave for helping me to figure out how to setup Particle OAuth2 for this sample . [Image] https://github.com/krvarma/particle-alexa-smart-home-skill As you all know Amazon recently release Alexa Smart Home Skill API. Amazon Alexa provides built-in smart home capabilities like turning on/off lights, control air conditioners, etc… Developer can use Alexa Smart Home Skill API to extend the smart home capabilities of Alexa. For Smart Home Skill …

[developer]

@Moors7

this

Yes i have followed this steps. And i was able to implement everything properly. But i am not able to connect with the particle device. Does particle have a pairing mode?

[ScruffR]

This would suggest that your skill hasn’t been registered properly.
Scanning for Particle devices does not really need the device to be online at all.
The only thing needed is the discovery lambda to report what capabilities your device will expose. The actual communication with the device only happens once the skill is triggered.

[developer]

@ScruffR
Thank your for the reply.So there should be a discovery code in lamda fuction?

[ScruffR]

If you look at the GitHub repo of the linked thread, you'll find this

krvarma/particle-alexa-smart-home-skill/blob/master/skill/lambda.js#L13

exports.handler = function(event, context) {
[...]
    switch (event.header.namespace) {
[...]
        case 'Alexa.ConnectedHome.Discovery':
            handleDiscovery(event, context);
            break;
[...]
};
[...]
function handleDiscovery(accessToken, context) {
[...]
}

[developer]

@ScruffR

nope not working, i also installed other particle skills but they weren’t also been able to discover particle photon device. Is there any update?

[ScruffR]

I have built my SmartHome skills just the way as shown in the original thread and they work as expected.

But while extending the skill to better suit my needs I introduced some JS errors (causing the discovery to fail) which needed some debugging on the Amazon side, which was a somewhat painful task of adding Console.log() statements all over the place to understand what event and context parameters get passed back and fro and where the lambda didn’t quite do its job as expected.

But the essence for me was, that when a Particle device is not discovered it is not the device but the setup on the Amazon side - either lambda or any of the administrative prerequisites.

[developer]

@ScruffR

Ok Thank you for your help. Atleast now i know where the problem is. i will work on the lambda function. I have just one more small question, what if i have ‘n’ number of devices so do i have to assign each device id in the lambda function? Or is there an easy way

[ScruffR]

So far I’ve added my few devices individually but with a bigger batch of devices a generic approach would be nice, but I haven’t investigated that (yet).

[developer]

ok thank you for the advice