I wanted to do something very simple: if the temperature in my kids' rooms got too warm, turn on a smart outlet that powers a window AC unit.

It turns out that ecobee and alexa do not have this capability built in - this makes sense. The thermostat does this natively with my central AC. My issue is that my house is old and has vastly different temperatures from upstairs to downstairs.

To solve this, I am getting my temperature from the ecobee API, checking to see if it is too hot/cold, then taking appropriate action with my VeSync outlets.

I have an Ecobee 3 lite with two Smart Sensors. I am also using Etekcity Voltson Smart WiFi Outlets.

That's the "smart" bit. To cool the room, I am just using your run-of-the-mill window AC unit I got at Home Depot or something...

To start, you need to create an app and authenticate with Ecobee.

VeSync is a bit easier to authenticate. Download the app and create a login. You'll use that login for the script.

This time around, I am using the google could instead of AWS. Either I messed up my AWS account or they did... either way, it says I need to pay before I can create a new instance, but there is no outstanding charges. The path of least resistance for me was to go to another cloud provide. I think it will be like $5 a month to run a small instance in the google cloud. Whatever.

You don't have to install much on the server - just R, the python pip installer, and open ssl.

sudo apt-get install r-base
sudo apt-get install python3-pip
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
sudo apt-get install sendmail mailutils sendmail-bin

You'll just need a few packages installed to run the R bit:

1. lubridate
2. httr
3. jsonlite

You can run this line of code in sudo R (as root):

install.packages(c("lubridate", "httr", "jsonlite"))

There are 4 packages called, but 2 should be installed with your system already.

1. datetime
2. sys

The other 2, you'll need to install:

1. pandas
2. pyvesync

You can do that with this code:

sudo pip3 install pandas
sudo pip3 install pyvesync

Go here and follow the steps.