Why might you want to emulate Wemo? Well I wanted to be able to control my Node-RED Raspberry Pi using my Amazon Echo. The Echo has Wemo support built in so I thought I'd give it a try.
It's pretty cool to be able to say 'Alexa, turn my garden watering system on' and my Pi turns on the outdoor watering system.
This Node-RED node is only a slim wrapper around the marvellous wemore Wemo library written by Daniel Leong.
Change directory to your node red installation:
$ npm install node-red-contrib-wemo-emulator
Drag the node on to your workspace, configure it as below and then ask Alexa to discover devices.
| Config | Description |
|---|---|
Node Name |
This is the name of the node as it appears in the Node-RED workspace |
Friendly Name |
This is the name that you'll see in the list of devices known to Alexa, it's also the name that you use in voice commands |
Unique ID |
This ID should be unique across all the wemo-emulator nodes in your workspace |
Port |
Wemore can automatically select a port to listen on, but it is recommended that you enter a unique port and increment it for each wemo emulator node you add to your workspace. This ensures that the port never changes. |
On Topic |
This is the topic sent when you ask Alexa to turn your thing on |
On Payload |
This is the payload sent when you ask Alexa to turn your thing on |
Off Topic |
This is the topic sent when you ask Alexa to turn your thing off |
Off Payload |
This is the payload sent when you ask Alexa to turn your thing off |
If Alexa can't discover the devices emulated by this node, please check you don't have a firewall blocking the following ports:
- 1900/udp
- You must also open the ports for all of the wemo emulator nodes configured
Install node-red-contrib-config and drag a config node into your workspace. Configure the node to set a global variable called wemo-emulator
with a JSON value of {"debug": true}. Also make sure that the config tickbox for active is unchecked. Redeploy. Now click the button on the config node.
This will trigger all instances of wemo-emulator to write extra logging to the os syslog next time they're invoked.
The node-red msg object now contains a sender object which attempts to identify the echo which was spoken to. This is still under scrutiny and may or may not work for you.