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 reading

Rhasspy 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 reading

Rhasspy 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 reading

Rhasspy 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 reading

Listen! … 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 reading

MyDashboard 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 reading

MyGasMeter – a low-power link between the gas meter and home automation

This sensor node is attached to the gas meter in my home. It uses a 2,4 GHz RF link to a MySensors MQTT gateway to reports natural gas consumption data to my home automation controller. The gas meter is of the type that creates magnetic pulses when the meter dial moves, so the connection is contact-less, and works without access to the inside of the “official” meter from the utility company.

Continue reading