Home Automation

Building a Voice-Controlled Front End to IoT Devices

Michael J. Hammel — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 13:44:37 +0000

Apple, Google and Amazon are taking voice control to the next level. But can voice control be a DIY project? Turns out, it can. And, it isn't as hard as you might think.

Siri, Alexa and Google Home can all translate voice commands into basic activities, especially if those activities involve nothing more than sharing digital files like music and movies. Integration with home automation is also possible, though perhaps not as simply as users might desire—at least, not yet.

Still, the idea of converting voice commands into actions is intriguing to the maker world. The offerings from the big three seem like magic in a box, but we all know it's just software and hardware. No magic here. If that's the case, one might ask how anyone could build magic boxes?

It turns out that, using only one online API and a number of freely available libraries, the process is not as complex as it might seem. This article covers the Jarvis project, a Java application for capturing audio, translating to text, extracting and executing commands and vocally responding to the user. It also explores the programming issues related to integrating these components for programmed results. That means there is no machine learning or neural networks involved. The end goal is to have a selection of key words cause a specific method to be called to perform an action.

APIs and Messaging

Jarvis started life several years ago as an experiment to see if voice control was possible in a DIY project. The first step was to determine what open-source support already existed. A couple weeks of research uncovered a number of possible projects in a variety of languages. This research is documented in a text document included in the docs/notes.txt file in the source repository. The final choice of a programming language was based on the selection of both a speech-to-text API and a natural language processor library.

Since Jarvis was experimental (it has since graduated to a tool in the IronMan project), it started with a requirement that it be as easy as possible to get working. Audio acquisition in Java is very straightforward and a bit simpler to use than in C or other languages. More important, once audio is collected, an API for converting it to text would be needed. The easiest API found for this was Google's Cloud Speech REST API. Since both audio collection and REST interfaces are fairly easy to handle in Java, it seemed that would be the likely choice of programming language for the project.

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Smart-Home Lightning Hacks

Shawn Powers — Mon, 14 May 2018 11:30:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Home automation should make life simpler, not more complex!

Kyle Rankin occasionally uses the "lightning hacks" format for his Hack and / LJ column when he has a bunch of neat topics to cover that wouldn't be enough for a complete article on their own. Thinking along those lines for this article, I figured it would be great to cover various home-automation stuff I do. Not only is it fun to share ideas, but if I make a list of all the cool things I'm currently doing, it will make it easier to compare the functionality of open-source options I'd like to explore next. If you haven't been dipping your toes into the world of home automation, maybe some of these hacks will change your mind.

My Setup

Most home-automation ideas can be implemented in multiple ways. In fact, I'm counting on that as I look into less-proprietary methods in the near future. But right now, I'm using a Samsung SmartThings hub. Yes, it is proprietary, but Samsung really has opened up the API and allowed developers to create device drivers and apps to customize the platform. I think SmartThings is the most feature-complete solution for home automation right now, but it does have a few frustrations. The most annoying is that it requires a constant connection to the internet in order to function. Most folks are frustrated with the inherent privacy concerns of home automation taking place in the cloud, and that's a big problem. For me, the more frustrating aspect is the effect shoddy internet service has on a home. If the internet goes down, so does 90% of my house! I have a few workarounds, but I know that a solid (not fast) internet connection is vital if your solution is cloud-based like SmartThings.

Anyway, my setup consists of the following:

Samsung SmartThings Hub v2.
Amazon Echo devices all over the house.
Google Home devices all over the house.
Sonos speakers in most rooms.
Various lights, switches, sensors and so on.

Having both Amazon Echo and Google Home isn't something I encourage; it's just that I have a habit of trying new technology, and they are both so amazing, I haven't yet chosen one over the other. Thankfully, they're pretty happy to function together.

Hack 1: the Mailman Detector

In my home, my office is all the way at the back of the house. In most homes, that's not a big deal, but in my case, my office is purposefully separate from the main living area so that when I'm recording videos, the house sounds don't interrupt. During the day, I'm usually home working alone, so I never know if a package has been delivered. The mailman could kick the front door down, and I'd never hear it in my office. My solution was to install a doorbell with a label about my office being all the way in the back (Figure 1), but sadly, most delivery folks just drop and run. So I decided to automate.

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Jarvis, Please Lock the Front Door

Shawn Powers — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 12:00:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

Years ago, we put out a request for articles on home automation. About the time Eureka came out on TV, people wanted to have their very own SARAH (Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat), and it seemed like the perfect time for nerds everywhere to make their houses smart. The problem was, although a few programs existed (MisterHouse for example), the hardware wasn't really reliable or highly available. The X10 company was about the only game in town hardware-wise, and it tended to be glitchy without much advantage over traditional switches.

In recent years, a glut of products have been dumped onto the market, all toting options for automated lighting, wireless switches and so on. Unfortunately, most were very closed and proprietary, forcing users to stick to a specific brand. That probably was the goal, but it backfired, because the concept of branding my house with proprietary hardware and software was anathema. Thankfully, times are changing, and the product that made me jump into the home automation pool with both feet is a surprisingly proprietary one: Amazon Echo (but, more on that later).

Wireless Communication

Several brands of home automation devices use standard Wi-Fi (2.4GHz) to communicate. At first glance, that seems like a good idea. Unfortunately, the 2.4GHz frequency is so cluttered, adding more devices might be counterproductive. It's also a high-bandwidth type protocol, which is just not needed for simple switching and communication.

Most home automation devices, regardless of brand, focus on the 900MHz spectrum. You might remember 900MHz from the days of cordless phones (not cell phones, rather the old cordless phones from the 1990s). For several reasons, 900MHz network devices have never really gone mainstream, which means the frequency isn't oversaturated. It also penetrates walls better, making it perfect for connecting devices around your home.

Unfortunately, everyone has been trying to become "the standard" in home automation, making the various brand names often incompatible with each other. When I decided to start using home automation devices, I wanted something that was compatible with the most products. For me, that meant SmartThings from Samsung. It supports the very common Z-Wave protocol and the ZigBee protocol, which is similar, but is based on an actual IEEE standard (IEEE 802.15.4).

Figure 1. SmartThings is my choice for the most flexible platform upon which to build.

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Home Automation with Raspberry Pi

Bharath Lohray — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 16:55:36 +0000

by Bharath Lohray

The Raspberry Pi has been very popular among hobbyists and educators ever since its launch in 2011. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer with a Broadcom BCM 2835 SoC, 256MB to 512MB of RAM, USB ports, GPIO pins, Ethernet, HDMI out, camera header and an SD card slot. The most attractive aspects of the Raspberry Pi are its low cost of $35 and large user community following.

The Pi has several pre-built images for various applications (https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads), such as the Debian-based Raspbian, XBMC-based (now known as Kodi) RASPBMC, OpenELEC-based Plex Player, Ubuntu Core, RISC OS and more. The NOOBS (New Out Of the Box Setup) image presents a user-friendly menu to select and install any of the several distributions and subsequently boot into any of the installed OSes. The Raspbian image comes with the Wolfram language as part of the setup.

Since its initial launch in February 2011, the Raspberry Pi has been revised four times, each time receiving upgrades but maintaining the steady price of $35. The newest release of the Pi (the Raspberry Pi 2) boasts a 900MHz quad core cortex A7 and 1GB of RAM. Moreover, Microsoft announced Windows 10 for the Raspberry Pi 2 through its IoT developer program for no charge (https://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/raspberrypi2support). This, in addition to its versatile features, has caused fans like me to upgrade to the Raspberry Pi 2. With a few new Raspberry Pi 2 boards in hand, I set out to find some useful ways to employ my older Pi boards.

In this article, I briefly describe the requirements of the project that I outlined, and I explain the various tools I decided to use to build it. I then cover the hardware I chose and the way to assemble the parts to realize the system. Next, I continue setting up the development environment on the Raspbian image, and I walk through the code and bring everything together to form the complete system. Finally, I conclude with possible improvements and hacks that would extend the usefulness of a Pi home automation system.

The Internet of Things

An ongoing trend in embedded devices is to have all embedded devices connected to the Internet. The Internet was developed as a fail-safe network that could survive the destruction of several nodes. The Internet of Things (IoT) leverages the same redundancy. With the move to migrate to IPv6, the IP address space would be large enough for several trillion devices to stay connected. A connected device also makes it very convenient to control it from anywhere, receive inputs from various sensors and respond to events. A multitude of IoT-connected devices in a home has the potential to act as a living entity that exhibits response to stimuli.

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