Diane spent the afternoon on her Windows computer working on the photobook she’s making for our trip to Costa Rica and Panama last year – which made it the perfect time for me to upgrade our home automation software.
I use Indigo on my Mac; it is relatively easy to deal with and has an active user community which makes plugins for various devices, such as the Amazon Echo. The latest release of Indigo added built-in support for the Echo; the old user-contributed plugin still works, but there won’t be any further updates or fixes, so I knew I’d want to migrate when I upgraded Indigo itself.
A normal Indigo migration takes less than an hour – they’ve been very good about not making changes that break plugins (unlike Home Assistant, one of the reasons I switched). This one took about four hours, much of which was spent deleting and redefining the devices that I control from the Echo – one at a time, of course.
As long as I was updating things, I took the opportunity to remove plugins I was no longer using and tried to do other cleanup; somehow, everything still seems to be working!
I’m not sure I like all of the decisions I made during the migration. For example, I changed from using the Sonos skill (which requires saying “Alexa, pause (or resume) Sonos”) to exposing the Sonos as a device on Indigo (so I can say “Alexa, turn Sonos on (or off)”). Making the change removes my ability to change the station or volume on the Sonos by voice, but I don’t think I ever did that anyway!
