I spent the weekend, well a few hours really, converting all of my home temperature/humidity probes over to IoT Cloud. Now they integrate with Alexa and I can use them as auxiliary thermostats to control fans, ducts, and the AC. Over all I'm happy with the environment. It feels very much like the standard desktop and all of the libraries and micro controllers I use are available. I'd give it a solid 8 out of 10. It's very good. Now for the down side. ESP8266 does not support OTA updates. Which is a downgrade. I was able to do OTA updates on my 8266s using the desktop IDE v 1.x. Being able to interface with Alexa is great, but the data types are not robust enough. There are temperatures in C and F, but Alexa doesn't seem to care what the units are. At least there is no way for Alexa to convert, so there is really no point in having separate C and F datatypes on the Arduino side. In that same vein, there is no humidity data type. But since Alexa doesn't seem to care what the units are, one could use a temperature datatype for anything you wanted to feed to Alexa as a floating point number. I don't know if Google and Apple work the same or not, I don't have those. There are other data types that would be useful, particularly on writeable values. For all I know though they would work just fine using the existing ones, but Alexa may have issues with treating a stepper motor or servo position as a TV volume or Light Brightness. A closer partnership between Arduino and the big four home automation providers (Amazon, Google, Apple, Home Assistant) would be wise. As I said, over all the UI and the ability to interface with Alexa is very good, I do think I would like IoT be built into the v2 desktop IDE, and bring back OTA for 8266.
