Alexa skill to control HomeVision Thermostat via ESP8266 without opening a router's port/firewall.
NOTE!! Heroku no longer supports free accounts. It's not clear whether this skill method will work with a paid account, or if it does, how the process might be different from what is described here.
Since I no longer use this skill (being replaced by Home Assistant functions), this feature is no longer maintained or recommended.
You must have a HomeVision Controller running HomeVisionXL software with the NetIO plug-in and an RCS TX-15B thermostat for this to work.
This project is based on the work of Nassir Malik. See his YouTube tutorials at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCn8v7OzXk7IqRdKZdf14yjA , specifically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrhkuJiahDs, and code at https://github.com/nassir-malik.
TCP code used to talk to the HomeVision system is a modified version from Big Dan the Blogging Man at https://bigdanzblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/esp8266arduino-ide-communicating-with-tcp/
In this project you will be able to control a HomeVision Thermostat via ESP8266 with Alexa skills without opening a firewall port or setting up a reverse proxy.
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Download this project and unzip.
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Deploy this project to Heroku by clicking this button
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Copy following folders to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\libraries"
arduinoWebSockets
ArduinoJson
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Update and flash your ESP8266 with "ESP8266/ESP8266_WebSocketClient/ESP8266_WebSocketClient.ino"
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Create an Alexa skills using the info in alexa utterences.txt and add Heroku app URL as an end-point
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Test and enjoy.
See also this Project's Wiki page for more details.