With millions of Alexa devices being sold, learning to build Custom Alexa Skills is becoming a highly sought after skill by employers. Electronics hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers can also use Alexa to perform home automation.
There is great power in being able to control any device in your home with an Alexa. But what if you want to perform home automation and have Alexa control your lights, appliances and even any tv in your home and have complete control to customize which devices you control with your voice without spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on smart home gadgets or devices?
By using a Raspberry Pi, it is easy to interface with home electronics and devices to create custom skills using Alexa to voice control anything in your home and achieve true home automation! This course will teach you how to build Alexa Skills that will run on any Amazon Echo device to voice control anything in your home.
In this course, you will learn:
- What is Alexa and the underlying Alexa ecosystem that uses the Alexa Voice Service
- We will discuss Custom Alexa Skills and you will learn the components that make up a Custom Alexa Skill
- We then dive into preparing your Raspberry Pi for the projects we will build
- We will describe the flask-ask Python library which we will be using to build Custom Alexa Skills
- You will learn how to use the Amazon Developer Portal to configure and create your Custom Alexa Skill
- We will build a Skill to control an LED connected to the Raspberry Pi with Alexa
- We then dive into using relays to safely connect to our Raspberry Pi and AC mains power
- We will create a Skill that allows you to control any device in your home to turn it on or off using Alexa
- We create an awesome project that will enable you to voice control any tv in your house even it is 20 years old using Alexa
- We will build an IR receiver and transmitter circuit that connects to our Raspberry Pi
- We will work with the LIRC (Linux Infrared Control) library on our Raspberry Pi
- You will be able to adjust volume, navigate channels, go to a specific channel, power on and off your tv using Alexa
- This can be completely customized to work with any tv
- You can add any functionality to the skill such as play, pause, rewind for DVRs or basically add any feature your remote can perform
The skills that will be created in this course can be run on any Amazon Echo device in your home. You will learn how to test the custom skills that we will build on an Amazon Echo or any Alexa-enabled device.
Along the way you will learn:
- Basic Electronics
- How to work with relays and safely control high voltage AC devices from a Raspberry Pi
- How to use an octocoupler circuit to allow electrical isolation to protect your Raspberry Pi when connecting to high voltage AC power from a relay
- How to work with GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi
- Learn about infrared transmitters and receivers
- Python programming
- Learn to program for Alexa
- How to build Custom Alexa Skills from scratch
- How to expose your Raspberry Pi to the internet via a publicly available https endpoint using Ngrok
- How to build projects for home automation and the internet of things that can be controlled via Alexa
