I decided to to try to get Alexa to turn on and off my gas fireplace. The fireplace had no internet control built in but rather used a RF remote to turn the remote on and off. The remote in question is the Skytech SR 1001TH but I would assume most of this plan would apply to similar remotes.

The general approach is to use an ESP8266 chip to WiFi enable the remote so that the On and Off buttons can be triggered via an HTTP request. Then using some scripts running a PiZero we can set it up so that asking Alexa to "Turn on Fireplace" will trigger the HTTP request to the ESP8266 which is connected to the the remote.

See the sequence diagram for a basic sequence of how the components interact.

Also check out the video of a quick demo of this working.

Equipment used:

Amazon Echo

PiZero (this could really be any server, it just needs to be on the WiFi and capable of running some Python scripts)

NodeMCU ESP-12 Board

2 Optoisolators (I used both a 4N35 and H11F1M successfully)

Some Wires

Soldering Iron