Awesome

alexa-marantz-py

Simple app to control my Marantz 5007 receiver (should work with related Marantz models as well) via Alexa.

The code is based on @anjishnu's useful Python version of Alexa Skills Kit.

It's running with Python 3.7 and the AWS command line tool.

Usage

1. Set up the skill and slot types

I made this before Amazon's API allowed uploading JSON directly for intent schema, utterances, slot types, etc., although skill/skill.json is up-to-date so you should use that instead of setting up slot types manually.

If you want to add utterances, you can add/modify utterances in skill/utterances.txt.glob and then make skill/utterances.txt to generate the changes. It's a little hack to allow simple globbing to simplify recognizing variants of different utterances.

Change the value of SKILL_NAME in the Makefile to whatever you called your skill, if you want to use the convenient make targets for updating the code and updating the port/IP of your port-forwarding firewall (see below).

2. Upload the skill itself

Create a lambda function using the AWS GUI (you only need to do this once). Then make upload_lambda to upload the Python code as the lambda body. If you look at the Makefile you'll see you need to have your AWS CLI credentials set up, etc. to use this feature.

3. Set up port forwarding

If you're like most people, your receiver and your Alexa device are behind your firewall/NAT. You will probably have to configure your NAT box to assign a static IP address to your Marantz receiver, and set up port forwarding to get packets through your NAT firewall.

The Python code looks for environment variables IP and PORT to do this. It expects to be able to send traffic to port PORT of your NAT box at IP, and that that traffic will be forwarded to your Marantz receiver.

To set the environment variables, say: IP=your_external_ip PORT=port_forwarding_number make update_port_and_ip If you don't set IP, the Makefile includes a command to try to figure it out using the OpenDNS resolvers and myip.opendns.com.
If you don't set PORT, the default value will be the one in the current Lambda configuration (i.e. unchanged).

Wasn't that easy?

You can now say things like:

Alexa, tell <skill> to play Roku

Alexa, tell <skill> to play my iPhone in zone 2 (in my house, Zone 2 is our piano room, so in the skills code, the piano room is an alias for zone two; modify to fit your house)

Alexa, tell <skill> to turn off