How does Alexa find the IP adress of my Hue Bridge?

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NewUser-b97b1119-1a09-453b-8d53-8125320abbb2 asked · Jun 20, 2017 at 04:37 PM

How does Alexa find the IP adress of my Hue Bridge?

Hello, I am quite new to Alexa skill development and still in the process of understanding how it works in detail. As far as I know the data flow to control e.g. a hue lamp in my house is as following:

The Echo sends my spoken words to the Alexa Cloud Service
The Alexa Cloud Service analyses the words and sends an intent to the Hue Cloud Service.
The Hue Cloud Service sends a request to my Hue Bridge at home.
The Hue Bridge switches the lamp.

My question is, how does the Hue Cloud Service know the public IP address of my Hue Bridge to communicate? (This IP address changes at least every 24h.)

As far as I understand, it will not be able get the IP address from the request sent by the Echo. So is it up to the Hue Cloud Service to get it somehow? E.g. the Hue Bridge autonomously sends this information regularily to the Hue Cloud Service in advance? Or does it work completely different?

I want to know this as I would like to create a custom skill to control one of my custom devices.

Thanks in advance,

Peter

alexa smart home how-to

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3 Answers

Answer 1 · 2017-06-22T21:08:39Z

meep answered · Jun 22, 2017 at 09:08 PM

It likely negates the need to 'know' the target device IP by using a slim IoT protocol such as MQTT.

I use this with my skill to communicate with software on the users network without the need to open ports or know the iP address of the machine running the software.

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Answer 2 · 2017-11-19T12:05:04Z

Hotstepper13 answered · Nov 19, 2017 at 12:05 PM

The (at least) builtin Hue Skill does not invoke external command.

If you tell Alexa to find your devices, the Echo will send a UPNP Broadcast that will be answered by the bridge, telling the Echo the (internal) IP of it self. After that the Echo send a discovery request to the bridge directly to exchange information about the connected devices (lamps).

I have build a small server that uses exactly this approach on order to switch my KNX connected devices, that is the reason why I know how this works.

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Answer 3 · 2017-06-22T20:36:01Z

Brian@Amazon answered · Jun 22, 2017 at 08:36 PM

Broadly smarthome skills use oauth to connect to the third party service provider. I'm not sure specifically how this works for say a hue bridge but the 3p provider can communicate with their bridge which can then control lights. Ie Alexa --> smarthome adapter --> 3p smarthome service via oauth --> smarthome hub or device

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How does Alexa find the IP adress of my Hue Bridge?

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