Being Lazy - Home Automation

14 Mar 2019

Note: This project is for fun purposes only. Not a commercial solution as a whole. CC BY-NC-SA

Idea:

What is Home Automation? It is a very big term meaning a lot of things nowadays. Literally, it is to automate your home. Like set timer for your devices, alarms and more. But it now means a method to communicate with your devices and also making it smart. But it is just equivalent to "Being Lazy". You need a way to turn on/off the lights because you are lazy to get up. Same to control other appliances! So, this project is intended to make your job easier by making it difficult (actually easy) to make and then enjoy your result (of code). In this project we will make our own assistant that listens to us and controls lights/fans/appliances; sets alarm for a specific task; answer some basic questions.

Hardware Required:

Matrix Creator // A wonderful board, with sensors and microphone array(x8) and FPGA //Matrix Voice will also use the same code
Raspberry Pi 3A + //Any RPi >2B will work
A USB cable, Keyboard, Mouse, Computer, etc.
Any WiFi connected board // for smart clock and alarm
Relay / LED / Light
Fan / Other Appliance

Software Required:

Matrix Core //OS: Lib for Creator
Raspbian Stretch Lite //OS of RPi
Snips Voice Assistant API // Snips provides Private-By-Design, Decentralized Voice Assistant Technology and Solutions.

NodeJS //Coding Language //MQTT required
Coding IDE // I used Visual Studio
Arduino IDE // for coding other connected devices (smart clock)
Matrix Malos OS //mostly not required but voice recognition problem on new one OS, So?

Schematics:

You just need to connect Matrix board to RPi, other connection of Relay and LED, etc. is pretty simple on a breadboard. And other co-controllers will be on a network.

All the different connections.

Features of Matrix Creator:

Explained in a video in extra brief: There are a lot more and more well documented. This is a short version>>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvsmHSGuSRg

More information: https://matrix-io.github.io/matrix-documentation/matrix-creator/overview/

Snips.ai

Why?

Snips is an offline assistant that you can make and then use. Recently it is gaining popularity and there are a lot of sources of information using it in the community.

It is pretty simple to use and the Website is also very great!

For setting alarm we can make a project like this with little tweaks to make it listen to our alarm request. It is getting NTP time so just add the local timezone and compare.

Smart Clock over Cloud - the project by F. Yao

For the rest, functionality follow.

The headphone (connecting speaker is recommended) My speaker did not have an amplifier so RPi signal was not heard at all.

Installing Matrix Core on RPi

From Hackster - Matrix Labs

If you haven't already, be sure to setup your Raspberry Pi with your MATRIX Device.

You can follow a guide here which walks through the whole setup, including flashing your micro SD card with our custom image (for this project), enabling ssh, and connecting to your Raspberry Pi remotely, in detail.

Enabling SSH allows the SAM CLI tool to connect to your Pi from your personal computer.

If you don't want to install our custom image, you will need to follow the steps below in order for Snips to work on your Raspberry Pi.

Install MATRIX Core
Setup JavaScript (ensure that MATRIX Core is working by running the example JS app)

Back

We are using JavaScript to develop our project but for other language and/or exploring the features and backed working visit

https://matrix-io.github.io/matrix-documentation/matrix-creator/device-setup/

https://matrix-io.github.io/matrix-documentation/matrix-core/getting-started/ //For Matrix Core

https://matrix-io.github.io/matrix-documentation/matrix-core/getting-started/core-installation/ //Installation guide - 2

Probably the Matrix Core may give errors with Audio related things which based on my experience can be fixed with Matrix Malos Installation again.

Setting up Snips

Setting up snips is very simple:

Go to https://snips.ai/ and click on sign up (if new).

Fill in the required data

And log into the console. You will not see any assistants if new.

Select Create New and the fill the details and press Create

To fully configure the snips follow the images below.

{gallery} Snips \|\| Start-to-End
Add the Apps to the Assistant. Click on add App and add apps Calculations and Weather_en. You will have to make a custom two Apps.
Select the new App and fill in details and click on create. Then select Edit App and you will see no intents added yet.
Create new intents lightVal and fanVal.
Create a new slot named power (you can make other but change it in the code) and add training examples.
Add a few training examples and then double click on the variable word and select the slot. Here on and off must be selected for power. Do this for fanVal also. See the next images for configuration.
After doing all the app must have lightVal and fanVal.
Info on than intents.
lightVal configuration.
Making a custom slot type and slot.
Alarm Set application for setting the alarms.
Details of AlarmSet
Time Set intent in AlarmSet App.

{gallery} Snips || Start-to-End

Add the Apps to the Assistant.

Click on add App and add apps Calculations and Weather_en. You will have to make a custom two Apps.

Select the new App and fill in details and click on create. Then select Edit App and you will see no intents added yet.

Create new intents lightVal and fanVal.

Create a new slot named power (you can make other but change it in the code) and add training examples.

Add a few training examples and then double click on the variable word and select the slot. Here on and off must be selected for power. Do this for fanVal also.

See the next images for configuration.

After doing all the app must have lightVal and fanVal.

Info on than intents.

lightVal configuration.

Making a custom slot type and slot.

Alarm Set application for setting the alarms.

Details of AlarmSet

Time Set intent in AlarmSet App.

Configuration

After making the assistant you need to first set up snips on your RPi. So follow Configure Snips.ai

After installing and testing with the installation of snips cli you need to deploy your assistant.

Make sure SSH is enabled on your Pi.

Connect to the RPi on SAM CLI on a terminal of your computer with

sam connect <RPi IP>

You will need to enter your credentials.

Then check if all services are working with

sam status

You should see that all services are working. The "snips-analytics" may not work but that is fine as it just handles some errors. If not refer to https://docs.snips.ai/additional-resources/troubleshooting

It will take some time to configure and then ask for credentials i.e., API Key and local region etc for the Calculations and Weather_en app.

Go to https://openweathermap.org/ Click on sign up and then login. Go to API Keys and "Generate" a new one and take note of that or put it in SAM CTL when asked.

Credintials of Calculatations (Currency Conversion)

Go to https://www.exchangerate-api.com/ Select start now after putting your details and you will get the API Key

Take a note of that and enter into SAM CTL when asked.

Then you need to deploy your assistant.

Go to snips console and select your assistant on bottom right click on "Deploy Assistant"

You will get a cmmand like this, copy and paste in your terminal os SAM CLI

Now enter all the API keys and other information and your assistant is good to go.

Type

sam watch

to see how your assistant performs the job.

Coding

The code is written in JavaScript. The Matrix Core supports both Py and JS but there are more examples in JS so that is the preffered language.

Take the code from Github repo and then paste it into RPi's specific folder.

Don't forget to change the username in assistant.js and pins in other code if using a different config.

Also, change the paths to intent if changed.

Look at Matrix Documentation for working of ZeroMQ and its core and more details.

Github Repo: https://github.com/vimarsh244/Being-Lazy---Home-Automation

After all, is done ssh into your Pi (with Putty) and "cd" to your folder and run assistant script with

node assistant.js

And your assistant will be working

You can see the processing in SAM CTL and see the triggers in Putty.

Working

Demonstration and Live Example+Problems:

Satisfactory Slow Motion Footage of that everloop leds:

An earlier video with custom wake word on a simple task:

Conclusion

This project turned out to be better than I expected and that it works. The only problem with me is that Snips needs a lot of practice to understand Indian/Asian accent and when there is more than one intent it causes a lot of problems.

But what I learned is: Home Automation projects are fun. There are long and sometimes boring but when you have a deadline they turn out to be pretty awesome.

<<Thanks for Reading >>