Building Alexa Skills for Home Automation with Raspberry Pi

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
No previous programming knowledge or electronics knowledge required. All principles taught from scratch!
No Amazon Echo device
is required to build and test skills.
What are you waiting for? Let's learn to build
home automation
and
internet of things
projects that you can control
via any Alexa Device now
!
Get
started
today!
Who this course is for:
Programmers who want to learn to build Alexa Skills
Someone interested in Home Automation
Developers working on Internet of Things Projects
Python programmers who want to build home automation projects with the Raspberry Pi
Developers wanting to learn to build Alexa Skills to work with Raspberry Pi for Home Automation
Electronics Hobbyists and Prototypers
Developer that wants to learn flask-ask
Entrepreneurs seeking to prototype automation and IOT ideas with Alexa
Someone who wants to understand the Alexa ecosystem and its capabilities
Beginners to electronics