Category: Home Automation
My disappointment with my Amazon Echo/Alexa device doubled every time I tried to use it and, after some recent exploration with live video streaming, I wanted to pair my desire for a quirky voice assistant with my desire to learn more about audio stream handling in javascript. The result is a cheesy AI voice assistant…
Over the past two years, I’ve had a few iterations on my home dashboard project. All of the integrations for a “smart home” have been rather dumb in the sense that they’re just handling static transactions or act only as a new channel for taking actions. I wanted to change this and start bringing actual…
I wanted to stream and record my home security cameras to the cloud for three reasons: 1) if the NVR is stolen, I’ll have the footage stored remotely, 2) (more realistically) I want to increase the storage availability without having to add hard drives, and 3) I want to increase the ease-of-access for my recordings.…
#FirstWorldProblems – having so many DVDs that you forget what you already own and end up buying multiple copies of the same movie. While 126 movies isn’t a massive collection, it’s enough for me to sometimes forget what I have when I’m pillaging the $5 bins at Best Buy and Target. To solve for this,…
NFC has proven to be a pretty useless technology for cell phones (unless you’re one of the people who use you Google Wallet/Apple Pay). Nevertheless, I decided to buy some tags and play with them because they’re so damn cheap (just over a dollar each, depending on the type). One useful application of NFC tags is…
In the previous post, I outlined the Home Dashboard touchscreen for controlling lights, temperature/humidity, displaying Amazon Echo information, displaying who’s home (via bluetooth sniffing), and displaying what was being watched on DirecTv. As this dashboard is intended to be a sudo remote control for my home, I thought it made sense to be able to actually…
After creating a desktop home automation dashboard and, later, a live stream “digital picture frame”, I got the idea to combine the two into an always-on control panel that condenses everything I care about into a single kiosk which can sit on my end table or nightstand. What it does It’s essentially a condensed UI of…
As noted here, I’m using the the DirecTV SHEF API and a Raspberry Pi to poll my DirecTV receivers every minute and store what they’re doing into a MySQL database. After ~6 months of storing that data, I thought it’d be interesting to analyze some of it. After all, do I really watch enough HBO and Starz to…
New Design The original design wasn’t “clean” feeling and didn’t function too well on mobile or even tablet displays. I changed that up a bit and the new design has a lot of transparent divs, bokeh background images, and some jquery to make actions a bit smoother. Wink Integration Improvements The initial integration of the…
Purpose Let’s just get it out of the way now — there’s no true practical purpose or value in doing this. I took this on as an experiment and opportunity to learn something new. What is it? Using a Raspberry Pi, some sensors, and a lot of Googling with trial and error, I took my…
