The original Echo Dot is next to the printer and is useful for doing a variety of things. Since it's next to the printer, I wouldn't necessarily need to see what's going on; I can use my eyes.
But in the bedroom, I was thinking that it might be nice to try to get this new device to display the streaming video (if I can program that into a skill card response).
Update: Still fighting with the Amazon Lambda function to push an image to the Echo Spot. Both the iOS Alexa app and the virtual Echo Show seem to be happy with the approach I'm taking (using a card). Looks like a lot is changing quickly in the Alexa development space and the docs aren't keeping up.
Well, I'm trying. It's got a screen and can do not only static images but videos (and audio). It's just that the documentation for the new product hasn't quite caught up on the development areas for it.
Oh, and it's a TFT screen with menuing, a microphone (obviously) and can do video conferencing.
I was going to make an Alexa skill for interacting with OctoPrint but, at the time, you couldn't communicate with the Echo over a local network. Everything had to go through the Amazon servers and, thus, OctoPrint would have to be exposed to the internet.
@ieatacid I wrote a firewall proxy as part of what's going on. And then I port-forward an ephemeral tcp port to the proxy. The Lambda function then uses the proxy to talk to the OctoPrint API. Ultimately, it's safe since the Lambda function has to provide the correct port, destination as well as the OctoPrint's API key.
I might be misunderstanding something here, but: No. Just because an appliance can connect to the internet (e.g. OctoPrint for fetching updates) doesn't mean that anyone can connect from the internet. I can assure you that not a single one of my devices here is "exposed to the internet" in a way that anyone could use them that is not me. And unless people jump through the hoops of port forwarding, VPNs and the like, this is the default case in most home networks.
