More boxes

[azurelunatic]

I believe I have tracked down the source of the hot electronics smell that shows up when the living room mini-split is on. It's my computer, which is currently sitting directly in the hot air path. So I am determined that I will move the tower very soon.


Mama has been sending boxes of my old stuff, now that she's no longer occupied by urgent house stuff and nursing Dad. The first one arrived Friday. The next three showed up today.

Among other things, I now have my Spock marionette, a few Star Wars items, several small boxes of tiny treasures, two baby blankets and an afghan, and most of the memorabilia associated with Nerd Camp.

I ... found my first engagement ring, in all its pewter glory.


Meanwhile, Belovedest has their ZigBee radio, after the Sengled hub started only occasionally talking to the internet. They've been muttering to themselves about assorted programming decisions.


We did not get around to moving my desk around today.

Comments

[jecook]

For home automation, I ended up ripping out all the wifi lights and power switch boxes and putting in zigbee versions tied to a hubitat. I went that route primarily because it had free hooks to make it play nicely with the amazon echos. It's mildly faster, and outside of the voice controls via the echos, it's all local. (I'm looking into replacing the echos with something that's local as well, but at the moment money's sorta tight for the hardware I'm going to need.)

[azurelunatic]

We're using Home Assistant, originally running on a designed-for-purpose Raspberry Pi type object, currently running on the living room Linux box. Currently I think 3 rooms are miked: living room, main bedroom, and possibly Alex's bedroom as well. All separate command phrases, since it doesn't seem like the thing plays nicely with microphone overlap.

The main bedroom microphone is an old Playstation webcam on a Pi; the main problem was the extremely bright blue active light, which we are currently solving with a handkerchief.

https://twitter.com/azurelunatic/status/1515805825574400001

The latest installment: https://silveradept.dreamwidth.org/880015.html

[silveradept]

Hopping into the thread (summoned like the Great Old One I sometimes feel like), it looks like someone has done work on bridging Rhasspy, the offline voice assistant that I use for voice commands to send to Home Assistant, with the Hubitat devices over MQTT.

You might have to get at least wrists or elbows deep into Python code to set up your intents and their corresponding actions (or, hopefully, the examples already implemented have enough, with the documentation, so that you can extend things to other devices.) The code repository is at https://github.com/hedgemybets/rhasspy-hubitat.

I don't know how much the Dots can be hacked to serve as local-only control, but if they can't, I think the Raspberry Pi W Zero 2, or a similar single-board computer given a microphone, could run Rhasspy anywhere you want to have voice control, and Rhasspy can definitely be set up in such a way that your most powerful computer is the base computer, the one that has the MQTT broker and does the processing from all the satellites and communicates back to them. (And probably would also run the bridge Python to interface with the Hubitat.)

I can't say, based on that GitHub, that it will be an easy and turnkey solution, but it looks like it's possible to achieve.

[jecook]

interesting. I was planning to use a windows app called VoxCommando and some custom xml configuration shenanigans with hubitat.

For me, it'll be more like getting thrown into the deep end of a helicopter crash rescue pool, but the install docs for rhasspy, the glue code, and the matrix voice look reasonable enough for someone who normally doesn't really screw around a whole like with coding to follow along with.
And seeing as I was planning on buying new hardware to replace the dots entirely (since vox commando is a windows app, that would mean buying a quartet of USFF windows boxen and some decent mics and speaker rigs for them), so for ~$200 and some futzing around, I can get a node up and running as a POC and go from there. Might have to build a case for it, but hey, I have a 3d printer and a tinkerCAD account for that. :D

[silveradept]

Sounds like you have a plan and the ability to work on your preferred environment to do it with, then. Good skills to you, and we'll be curious to hear from you how it turned out, since I had a beast of a time trying to get Rhasspy to work under the Windows Subsystem for Linux. If Vox Commando can play nice with my current intent system, then one more mic would mean control possibilities for the one room where voice control would be a good idea, but it hasn't happened yet.