Skip to content
nanowebcoder edited this page Mar 7, 2016 · 3 revisions

Welcome to the NanoVeraHuesBridge wiki!

First off, kudos to Armazilla's excellent JAVA application: Amazon Echo HA Bridge. It allows Vera and Veralite users to very easily connect Amazon Echo into their home automation environment by emulating a Philips Hue hub.

Basically, the Echo locates the software (using SSDP). Then, by using some RESTful web service calls, Echo tells the software to turn lights on or off (or set their intensity to a certain percent). The software receives these requests from Echo and then translates the request into http GET (or POST or PUT) commands that are then sent to Vera.

For those with extensive linux skills, or Raspberry PI projects, a JAVA application is a good thing.

However JAVA applications are not a lot of fun in a Windows environment. They are somewhat difficult to configure and even more challenging to run as an unattended Windows service. Enter the NanoVeraHuesBridge. Written entirely in C# and leveraging the .NET 4.5 api stack (especially its self-hosted web service), the bridge software runs as a native Windows service consuming as little as 15mb of RAM.

Other changes were made to Armzilla's project, notably making the device configuration file a plaintext file and using nLog to provide more versatile logging options. The author felt a plaintextfile is more conducive to backup regimens and trying out various configurations without having to hand-configure changes. Copy the DeviceConfig.txt file to a safe location, then swap in a different one, restart the service and away you go!

The solution is divided into several projects:

DeviceEditor - This is a Windows desktop application that will configure the service (after its been installed and turned on). It communicates with the service using a RESTful API (hats off to Armzilla!).

NanoVeraHuesBridgeService - This is the native Windows service which consumes the VeraHuesBridge library.

VeraHuesBridge - This project contains the core routine libraries.

VeraHuesBridgeTester - This is a Windows application that consumes the VeraHuesBridge routines and makes it easier to debug and test things.

Each solution will have its own page in the wiki.

Clone this wiki locally