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Alexa-powered LED Blinker

Blinking an LED yourself is too hard, so I'll ask Alexa to do it

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This is my entry to the "Blink an LED" MacroFab Design Contest. I wanted to do something that was easy to set up but also very powerful. I created a custom Alexa Skill that sends data to Losant where it can be transformed and sent elsewhere. In this example, I'm also using the Particle Call to send data to a Particle Photon to set the blinking frequency of the onboard LED.

This project uses minimal code, and could probably even use no code if I put additional work into the Losant side. I provide this simple example so anyone can get started with voice control and extend it to other uses. I can easily see it controlling test equipment -- set the frequency to 1kHz, set the voltage to 3.3V, set a trigger point on an oscilloscope. All of these things would be nice to do using voice when your hands are full trying to probe a signal.

Here's some videos of it working. Check out the Build Instructions for the full process. It seems that there's a lot of steps, but they're all very easy. It's all about putting the right data in the right location.

My work is heavily based on these two blog posts from Losant:

https://www.losant.com/blog/how-to-build-an-interactive-alexa-skill-with-no-code-using-losant

https://www.losant.com/blog/how-to-integrate-particle-with-losant

  • 1
    Sign up for an Amazon Alexa developer account

    Sign up at https://developer.amazon.com/alexa/ and register your Alexa devices if you want to use it for testing.

  • 2
    Create a new Skill in the Skill Console

    Create a custom skill and name it whatever you like. The name is only important for storing everything related to your skill.

  • 3
    Enter an invocation name for your skill

    This is what you'll use to trigger the skill. I chose to call it "MacroFab", so I would say "Alexa, ask MacroFab to...."

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