Ray, I considered using /cr but decided against it. Alexa often gets things wrong. /cr would require a pretty long utterance (Amazon’s term of art for instructions to Alexa) to be heard 100% correctly. “Alexa, water zone six for 3 minutes, 30 seconds” is about the best I can hope for. Even with that fairly short utterance I have her reply. “Watering has started. Zone 6 will be watered for 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Open Sprinkler reported all is well”. The ‘all is well part’ is triggered by a <200> response code from the JSON call.
It would be really nice to make this available to others, but it would be difficult. First off, I doubt many would be interested. Worse yet, somewhere a reliable, secure server would have to ‘broker’ ( I am sure that’s not the right term) everyone’s usernames, passwords, port numbers and globally mapped I.P. addresses to the Amazon Echo skill. That appears to be what Nest is doing with the thermostat and smoke alarms.