Posts arising from my Alexa + TV hacking

[shaundon]

I hacked together a thing where Alexa can control my TV which involved doing a few things I haven't done before, which may make good blog posts:

1. Running a NodeJS app on a Raspberry Pi / Linux server in the background with forever and Crontab to make sure it runs on startup.
2. Using No-IP combined with port forwarding on a router to open an HTTP server to the public internet with a defined hostname (you can do this easily with ngrok but you'll need a paid account if you want the hostname to stay the same. This solution is free).
3. Writing a basic Alexa skill in Lambda. There's lots of tutorials about this online but a lot of them go quite deep. I want to write one that does the bare minimum you can build from as a foundation.

This issue is my reminder to do them!

[shaundon]

#33 Addresses point 1.