• You all may know that I've been wanting to voice control my room for some time. I've gone through two EasyVR boards (one failed, the other one I gave up on - I was never able to beat 5-10% recognition rate on either unit), and spent many precious hours farting around with them, with little to show for it other than the module code and that gem of a response from the manufacturer in the other thread here.

    So I just bought an Amazon Echo. I think that will be better - it definitely has the voice recognition down, which is more than I can say for the other solutions I've tried. The home automation feature of the Echo works with WeMo devices, like Belkin smart outlets. Luckily, you can spoof WeMo devices, and hence take arbitrary action in response to an on/off command.

    I haven't had much time to look into how this all works - my python is a bit rusty - but this code very definitely works: I can run their demo code on my linux system, and say "Alexa, turn on device" and it works as expected. I mean, not that that's profound or anything "the example works". https://github.com/toddmedema/echo

    I'll be trying to set this up to get voice control on my lights with a linux server this weekend, and I don't expect it to be particularly challenging. But I don't want to use the linux box full time - so the immediate question was whether this could be adapted to run on an Espruino... And then I thought, maybe someone else has done this - so I asked here.

    The alternative I'm looking at is a Raspberry Pi - they say it works on that. The problem with a Raspberry Pi is getting one. Every place I check is out of stock on all of them except the most expensive model, the 3.0 - when I think any of them would do it for me. I can get "starter kits" with piles of parts that I don't want because I already have better versions of said parts, sold at eye-watering prices. Does anyone know how to actually buy a raspberry pi? Is the only option EBay? I can get a $5 pi zero on eBay for $18...

  • Hey,

    I can't much help you with the WeMo question (though I do currently send commands to a few WeMo switches from my nodeJS server [whose primary purpose is to control all my Philips hue lights]) but the Raspberry Pi comment caught my eye. I have two of the Pi 2 Model B sitting unused and would be happy to shoot them over to you. Your profile says you're close. I'm in NYC so shipping would be cheap, and I'm not so much worried about getting top dollar as I am just getting rid of all my surplus gear so it doesn't go to waste. I think I've booted the one like twice, and the other one maybe never haha, so they're not heavily used by any means.

    Let me know if you're interested and I'd be happy to send them quickly, on my dime more or less. This is my first post here ever, but I refer you to a recent surplus gear sale of some WeMo Makers I had (http://community.wemothat.com/t5/WEMO-Ma­ker/unused-wemo-makers-for-sale/m-p/3151­4#U31514). My little explanation on that forum that I'm not some fly-by-night seller even though it was my first post ever applies here as well haha.

    (I have boatloads of other surplus gear like Arduinos and tons of sensors and nonsense from Adafruit. My mentality is that if I ever think of something cool I wanna be able to immediately do it and not have to wait to get my hands on different components. It's not necessarily the smartest mentality since I piss away money haha, but whatreyagonnado?)

  • I would love to buy one of those! (or two - but I only need one in the short term, and I don't want you to be left Pi-less if you wanted to have one in stock for future projects). How much you want? Send me a PM :-)

    Is this like, a perennial problem with getting Raspberry Pi's, or are they just having a spell of production/distribution problems.

    I have the same philosophy as you do on keeping stock... I sometimes go on ebay and search keywords related to arduino and such in industrial and test equipment, looking for interesting things. I think that's how I found out that lightning detector chips are available (don't have one yet, it's like $30 for boards with the bells and whistles from embedded adventures, which seems to have better looking boards than the ebay sellers)

    Uhh.... Yeah...


  • About keeping extra stock... you easily have me beat. I won't even bother with a picture of what I thought was too much spare equipment haha.

    I'm not sure about your Pi difficulties. I've only bought them maybe two or three times, and my usual go-to is Amazon where they were easily available... at least when I happened to be looking. But I have seen complaints that the zero is hard to get. In any case, I sent you a PM about my Pis.

    Looking back at your original post and wanting to control your room with voice, it sounds like we were working towards a similar goal. Mine was all about controlling Philips hue lights (I replaced every single bulb in my apartment haha) along with a few WeMo switches (i.e., for the kitchen fluorescent light which couldn't be replaced with a hue). Voice was one of my ultimate goals, but as an optional control method. The main control was automatic, using Google's prediction API. Using motion sensors and other data, I came up with a set of metrics and measures and after building a good sized teaching set to initialize the API, I eventually got to the point where everything was controlled automatically.

    But this was all before getting more interested in the hardware side of things, since I'm originally more of a software guy. Enter arduinos, etc., and Espruino. (For what it's worth, Espruino has been my favorite and it's where I've settled in, if @Gordon is listening). I have a working prototype built of a 3D printed cube with an Espruino for the brains that sets one of six different lighting scenes based on its orientation.

    But now I've taken over your post to ramble about my own project haha, sorry about that. Check your PM for the Pi stuff, and I'm happy to bounce around ideas for room control stuff if you want. My project is never really done anyway.

  • @tambeb Thanks! It's really nice to know!

    I think @DrAzzy has me beaten on the parts side of things as well :)

    Looking at it, you might need UDP support in Espruino (at least for UPNP for discovery), which isn't in there yet I'm afraid. However, there's the MQTT example there... I'd be tempted to make Espruinos that communicate with MQTT to a Pi server - it might make it easier to keep track of what's happening (and which devices are online) as well...

  • Gordon has mentioned this in another post but annyang has worked out well for me for my voice projects, it mostly works, if i had to guess I'd say about 95% in my experience.

  • That's cool. Include this in your homeautomation. Google will be listening what you are saying and is able to control your home....

  • Cool - that's interesting that you can get the whole thing to work automatically without having to manually intervene. I can see that working particularly well for functional lighting (most of my lighting is at least partially decorative)

    What I'm doing now is up here https://github.com/SpenceKonde/echo - I've pulled in Hue emulation too. It's working (with a few issues) on a desktop system running Linux, and I'm looking forward to getting it working My plan with that is to use it to control my pingpong lights ( discussed here http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/­280762/ ) - I'll use the "Set X to Y" phrase, and that gets me 100 different settings I can tell it to use - it doesn't have to be brightness. I want to have 5 strings (10 lights each), and one word will control all of them, and I'll define the scenes on each of them so, say scene 7 makes all strings go into "flicker like a candle flame" mode, or scene 90 makes them all give a warm white, and so on.

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Has anyone tried impersonating a WeMo device direct on an Espruino? (for voice control via Echo)

Posted by Avatar for DrAzzy @DrAzzy

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