Google Home Home

Schematic

Inspiration

We had the chance to work on google home which is very early in its dev cycle. Sundar Pichai is our hero because he has theorized google home and we mastered home integration through google assistant. Mayur Talole and Cathy Tran helped keep our team together and our morale high to sustain this bombardment of learning.

What it does

We can control aspects of the home, such as doors and lights, using google home.

How we built it

Using api.ai we used webhooks to post a query of JSON to the raspberry pi web server. This server then parsed the JSON post for key parameters and respective values. After evaluating key parameters we sent a serial connection to the arduino calling on different functions to control the makeshift home. (LED's for simplicity as we can't get our hands on a door)

Challenges we ran into

Since google home is a very new product and not many people have written thorough documentation on custom frameworks we ran into a handful of problems. An example would be our webhooks. We had trouble initially getting the webhooks to reach a public facing URL. We tried domain.com and AWS to no avail.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

To solve the server problem we tunneled our local host to make it accessible on the network. This was accomplished by using ngrok.io and the server was set up using sinatra and ruby.

What we learned

We learned conversational intents using api.ai as well as securing an IOT network. We had to learn ruby from scratch to create our web server as well as using NFC devices to interact with the arduino.

What's next for Google Home Home

Google Home Home Home.

Built With

Submitted to

HackUTD 17

Created by

Worked on the conversational api using intents and entities. Helped with web server functions on sinatra as well as parsing JSON to send over serial to the arduino. Arduino serial input to control connected shields and pins/devices.

Shravan Patel
Just trying my best!
I worked on receiving jsom from api.ai, parsing it for key parameters and forwarding the correct information to the arduino over a serial connection.

Nicolas Jordan
I worked on integrating the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, setting up the NFC Reader on the Arduino and transferring it to the Pi via a Serial connection. The Pi and Arduino communicated on a full duplex Serial line, requiring a Serial listener script on the Pi to read and respond to Serial transmissions (NFC authentication, etc) from the Arduino.

Arnold Wey

Updates

Shravan Patel started this project — Mar 05, 2017 10:48 AM EST

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