Smart house with his own hands: electrical automation and home theater

In a previous article was shownHow to use the add-in "in Russian Assistant" manage music or voice Yandex conventional browser. Today I'll show you how you can give voice commands household appliances as well as home theater XBMC.

Home automation

I've always been interested in creating a system of voice control smart home. That at any moment it was possible to send a command to switch light or air conditioner, ask to put a movie or find out how many now degrees in the room and much more.

To date, for the realization of all these functions, you can either use the services of experts on the organization of intelligent buildings - it is very expensive. Well, or to try to do all that is quite difficult. But as a rule, not in any other case, you can not use voice control ...

As I said earlier, "Assistant to the Russian" offers third-party developers the ability to develop their own voice programs, add-ons, which can in turn implement any logic - from setting the alarm to remote control air conditioning. Taking advantage of this truly innovative voice architecture, I was able to create the first prototype of the add-on "Connect Wizard" controlling electrical outlets. That's how it looks ...

To carry out this experiment I needed ZWave home automation controller Vera3 and a pair of ZWave outlets. The creation of the add-on took me only a few days - it can be downloaded here.

All you need to control electronic devices - is the above described equipment and Android smartphone set "Assistant to the Russian." The main thing is that your smartphone and your controller Vera3 were in the same home Ethernet-network.

Due to the fact that the "Assistant to the Russian" can be trained to user commands, you can write several commands for the standard home automation scenarios. For example, the phrase "I'm home," Assistant can turn on the TV, the lights in the room and air conditioning. To assistant remembered your team, you once said, "Turn on the TV, the lights and air conditioning when you hear the phrase" I'm home. ' "

Home Theater

Of course, this is a very simple possibility of voice control, and they are clearly not enough options that I described at the beginning of this article. So I took up the creation of a home theater system control functions. And that's what happened.

All I've got - it's a TV with HDMI input and PC on Windows 7. For the organization of home theater I used the free decision of XBMC, which can be downloaded at any platform - Windows, MacOS X and Linux. XBMC advantage is its openness to developers at the expense of my addon that can convert voice commands into actions on the screen.

Now you can manage your music, movies, the volume, check the weather, include slideshow. To do this in the settings of XBMC must enable WebServer on port 8080. Then the addon "Assistant Connect" will be able to send remote commands to your theater. Do not forget to add all your music albums in the audio library, otherwise the assistant will not be able to recognize the names of genres and artists.

In custody

ZWave - this is a very common protocol that is used in a variety of devices - sockets, dimmers, thermostats, blind control, IR transmitters and more. Due to the open API «Assistant to the Russian" can be connected to any of them or many at once, performing all possible operations. And voice.

It's really good, and it may be repeated every home.