In the previous parts of this series I described my objectives for and anticipated benefits of my home automation system (part 1), detailed the implementation (part 2), and described real benefits and some technical “lessons learned” (part 3). Three years have passed since I wrote part 3, so it is time to look at what has changed: what do I see as the real benefits of the home automation today? What new technologies have I introduced, if any? What additional
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Rhasspy with openHAB
I wanted my voice interaction solution to be fairly independent from openHAB, in order to have the option to switch to a different home automation controller in the future. That drove my design decisions in how to couple Rhasspy and openHAB.
The solution also needed to extensible: I expect to add more openHAB items for lights and other gadgets in the future, and I don’t want to have to manually edit lists of expected voice command sentences every time I do that.
I implemented three kinds of voice interaction: voice announcements, voice commands and voice questions and answers.
Continue readingRhasspy with openHAB, part 3: questions and answers
In addition to voice announcements and voice commands, I also implemented a “dialog” feature, where I can ask for information, and get an answer from the system. Currently, this very limited, I can only ask for the time of day, for temperature and humidity. In /etc/openhab/things/rhasspy.things we have In /etc/openhab/items/rhasspy.items we have in other .items files, I have (the details are not relevant for what I am trying to explain here) In /etc/openhab/rules/rhasspy.rules we have This part is a bit
Continue readingRhasspy with openHAB, part 2: voice commands
The bird’s eye view of what has to happen here is: That was the bird’s eye view. And now for the details … How to tell Rhasspy what to expect Whenever I add or edit an openHAB item that should be the subject of a voice interaction, I want the Rhasspy configuration to change automatically, to reflect the change in openHAB. For this purpose, I have defined several openHAB groups: Group name Purpose gVA voice-activated items like light switches that
Continue readingRhasspy with openHAB, part I: voice announcements
In this feature, information flows only in one direction: from openHAB to me, no speech recognition involved. How openHAB communicates with the text-to-speech engine Bird’s eye view: to trigger a spoken announcement, openHAB publishes an MQTT message that contains all the relevant information: what to say, and on which satellite to say it. When the message is received by the master Rhasspy service, it converts the text to audio and then streams it to the specified satellite. openHAB talks to
Continue readingListen! … voice interaction with home automation
I have used an openHAB based home automation setup for several years now, and I am mostly happy with it … except in those very lazy moments where I just want to turn on a light, and wish I didn’t have to to pull my phone from my pocket, unlock it, open the openHAB app, navigate to the right UI page, and push a button. So … I decided it was time for voice-based interaction, Alexa style.
Continue readingRhasspy satellite with Raspberry Pi — UPDATED
I have several Raspberry Pies around the house, serving as voice interfaces (Rhasspy “satellites”), some of them also as media players using Kodi. They all have a ReSpeaker 2-Mics Pi HAT sound card, which contains two microphones and an audio output, connected to a small speaker.
Continue readingMyDashboard for openHAB — home automation status at a glance
Before I leave the house, I want to see an overview of all relevant home automation variables: are all the windows and doors closed? are all the lights off? is my computer off? is the washer or dryer still running?
For this, I built a small, battery-powered display next to the front door. It has a Wifi connection to the home network, and pulls all relevant OpenHAB variables via its REST interface, every hour, and at the push of a button
Continue readingLight control for indoor plants
Winter is approaching, so I needed to bring my kitchen herbs collection inside, and I thought some artificial light might help to keep them thriving during the dark part of the year.
Continue readingFreezer door open alarm
We all need to minimize energy consumption these days, so what you really don’t want is for the freezer door to be not completely closed, accidentally, wasting a lot of electrical energy.
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