Like many people, my girlfriend and I sleep with white noise in the background generated by a fan in the bedroom. Often enough we’ll forget to turn the fan on until we have already gotten into bed, at which point it quickly becomes a back and forth of “it’s your turn to get up and turn it on” (spoiler: it’s always my turn). Because of this, I have decided to update a fan using Android Things in order to turn the fan on through an app, as we always have a phone near us plugged in to the wall at night.
There are four parts to this project: the IoT fan, the mobile app for controlling the fan, the Google Assistant API, and a Firebase backend for managing state data. While the phone app could communicate directly with the fan through bluetooth, I have opted to use Firebase in order to support scaling the project to other platforms later on, such as a web platform or iOS. Another option that could be used in the future is Google’s Cloud IoT Core, although, at the time of this writing, it is still in a private beta.
To start, this tutorial will set up the fan to turn on and off with a mobile app. While that’s a fun start, we’re going to aim for awesome. The next step will be to incorporate Google Assistant into the device, as I currently have a Google Home in the kitchen, but not one in the bedroom, and this seems like a great project for incorporating that technology. With that said, let’s get started making the initial project!
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