“Alexa, where are the cats?”

As is well documented, I have a significant number of feline overlords who thanks to multiple Sure Petcare cat flaps can come and go as they please. The new Connected range of cat flaps comes with a web site, iOS app (a thin skin over the same web site) and is built using what appears to be a pretty solid RESTful API. A few months ago I spent a bit of time monitoring the web app to reverse engineer bits of the API, and then built an Alexa skill so that I could ask my house where all the cats are.

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Impatience as Impetus: Building Alexa Sonos Integration

I’m impatient. I like new toys and new technologies and I generally don’t want to wait to play with them. We’ve been happy Sonos customers for years now, and Alexa customers since the UK launch. So when Sonos and Amazon announced a partnership to directly integrate the two in August last year, I was cautiously optimistic, albeit impatient to see it working. They promised a beta in 2016 and a launch in early 2017. I didn’t hear anything for the rest of that year, and wondered when we’d get an update on progress… Continue reading

Connect IFTTT to Internal Node Server

I spent a bit of time last night putting together the final pieces of code that’ll connect alerts on IFTTT to devices and systems on my internal network, via a simple node.js server. It sits on the edge of my network listening for some JSON to be POSTed at it, and then relays the JSON to a machine inside the network. Initially just one machine – the Plex HTPC in the living room, but eventually I’ll add more logic. Continue reading