Lately the Startup fever hit my city and a bunch of events dedicated to entrepreneurship and innovation are spawning all over the place. One such event was the reason that me and a few friends decided to test out the possibility to send voice commands from an Android Wear smartwatch to a RaspberryPi computer in order to activate/deactivate some electrical devices such as fans or lightbulbs. The actual hackathon that we prepared for never happened, but we decided to implement our idea in order to see a working proof of concept anyway. Who knows, maybe we can come up with something in the future or participate at other events to show off.
Anyway the whole thing was a good experience from which I learned some stuff that I would like to share with others who might have the IoT fever. Following, I’ll describe a bit our solution and how we made things work.
So, here’s the story behind the idea: we started from thinking how cool it would be to turn on or off your fans or other home appliances by using your smartwatch to voice command them. Normally home appliances are just plain electrical devices who need to be manually turned on or off and they rely on electrical circuits from your home to deliver their power. At first look, you might be tempted to think: how can they be controlled from a smart watch? They are just ordinary home appliances, not even the smart kind you might find in stores lately, that are integrated with all kinds of home automation solutions and which, of course, have a price tag to match their “smarts”. But where there’s a will there’s a way.
Disclaimer: The things I’ll describe next won’t make your home apliances smart, they’re still gonna be the good old dumb appliances you’ve come to appreciate and love. What we did is just a simple trick to turn them on or off using your voice, no features change, the devices still remain as they are.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!