#thread
Any Home Assistant fans out there? Got myself a RPi3 a few months ago and got hooked on HA, because of the huge product support and great community. Didn't find any dashboards that I liked so created my own, written in JS, fully customisable and support for most if not all kinds of gadgets. The purpose was to have something easy to use for the whole family, on a wall-mounted tablet. What do you guys think?

Anyways, has anyone done some cool home automations/scripting? Would love to hear about it!

FYI Google sends you a free Google Home and a T-shirt if you have a good standing Google Assistant Action

Let the spying begin!

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

I've recently received another invitation to Google's Foobar challenges.

A while ago someone here on devRant (which I believe works at Google, and whose support I deeply appreciate) sent me a couple of links to it too. Unfortunately back then I didn't take the time to learn the programming languages (Python or Java) that Google requires for these challenges. This time I'm putting everything on Python, as it's the easiest language to learn when coming from Bash.

But at the end of the day.. I am a sysadmin, not a developer. I don't know a single thing about either of these languages. Yet I can't take these challenges as the sysadmin I am. Instead, I have to learn a new language which chances are I'll never need again outside of some HR dickhead's interview with lateral thinking questions and whiteboard programming, probably prohibited from using Google search like every sane programmer and/or sysadmin would for practical challenges that actually occur in real life.

I don't want to do that. Google is a once in a lifetime opportunity, I get that. Many people would probably even steal that foobar link from me if they could. But I don't think that for me it's the right thing to do. Google has made a serious difference by actually challenging developers with practical scenarios, and that's vastly superior to whatever a HR person at any other company could cobble together for an interview. But there's one thing that they don't seem to realize. A company like Google consists of more than just developers. Not only that, it probably consists - even within their developer circles - of more than just Python and Java developers. If any company would know about languages that are more optimized such as C, it would be Google that has to leverage this performance in order to be able to deliver their services.

I'll be frank here. Foobar has its own issues that I don't like. But if Google were a nice company, I'd go for it all the way nonetheless - after all, they are arguably the single biggest tech company in the world, and the tech industry itself is one of the biggest ones in the world nowadays. It's safe to say that there's likely no opportunity like working at Google. But I don't think it's the right thing. Even if I did know Python or Java... Even if I did. I don't like Google's business decisions.

I've recently flashed my OnePlus 6T with LineageOS. It's now completely Google-free, except for a stock Yalp account (that I'm too afraid to replace with my actual Google account because oh dear, third-party app stores, oh dear that could damage our business and has to be made highly illegal!1!). My contacts on that phone are are all gone. They're all stored on a Google server somewhere (except for some like @linuxxx' that I consciously stored on device storage and thus lost a while back), waiting for me to log back in and sync them back. I've never asked for this. If Google explicitly told me that they'd sync all my contacts to my Google account and offer feasible alternatives, I'd probably given more priority to building a CalDAV and CardDAV server of my own. Because I do have the skills and desire to maintain that myself. I don't want Google to do this for me.

Move fast and break things. I've even got a special Termux script on my home screen, aptly named Unfuck-Google-Play. Every other day I have to use it. Google Search. When I open it on my Nexus 6P, which was Google's foray into hardware and in which they failed quite spectacularly - I've even almost bent and killed it tonight, after cursing at that piece of shit every goddamn day - the Google app opens, I type some text into it.. and then it just jumps back to the beginning of whatever I was typing. A preloader of sorts. The app is a fucking web page parser, or heck probably even just an API parser. How does that in any way justify such shitty preloaders? How does that in any way justify such crappy performance on anything but the most recent flagships? I could go on about this all day... I used to run modern Linux on a 15 year old laptop, smoothly. So don't you Google tell me that a - probably trillion dollar - company can't do that shit right. When there's (commercialized) community projects like DuckDuckGo that do things a million times better than you do - yet they can't compete with you due to your shit being preloaded on every phone and tablet and impossible to remove without rooting - that you Google can't do that and a lot more. You've got fucking Google Assistant for fucks sake! Yet you can't make a decent search app - the goddamn thing that your company started with in the first place!?

I'm sorry. I'd love to work at Google and taste the diversity that this company has to offer. But there's *a lot* wrong with it at the business end too. That is something that - in that state - I don't think I want to contribute to, despite it being pretty much a lottery ticket that I've been fortunate enough to draw twice.

Maybe I should just start my own company.

Coolest thing I’ve built solo?

Damn, there’s been a lot of things over the years, but I guess the most used one I’ve made would be my voice activated tv remote - yes it’s real.

So in essence it’s a google home... yea I know spyware and all, but look it was free so I’m going to make use of it... err where was I, oh yea.

An IFTTT account which taps into the google assistant API and creates a webhook, although the authentication side of things is 0 to none, so had to put a api-key into the requests to at least have some layer of auth.

This webhook then hits a raspberry pi containing a PHP API to accept and authenticate the request in, digest this into KEY commands for the TV, and drops this into a Python script to connect to the TV over a web socket connection ( I found python more stable for this ) and sends the pre made key requests, it can even do multiple keys at a time... that was a pain.

So after all that, the end game becomes about a second from saying “hey google, change the tv channel to xxx”

This sick and twisted contraption is finished and the tv is my little bitch.

This has been built out to handle channels by name, number, volume up/down, sources switching to hdmi, tv, vga and a bunch of other things.

The things we do when we can’t find a tv remote for days....

Next up, getting it to launch Netflix app and going to a specified show / episode.. but may be to adventurous.

What's your favorite IT podcast, and do you listen while programming?

I follow:
Linux action show,
linux unplugged,
late night linux,
home assistant podcast.

Most of the time on about 1-1.5x speed.

A free, open source, modular (plugin based) home automation control center.
Ultimate goal is to support the core / apis and other devs code the drivers for the 'IoT' devices.
Also integratable with all the speech assistants like Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, Cortana etc.
Not that money dependent but very time consuming project.

Im starting in a week tho!

So I'm reading up on the HomeAssistant documentation to prepare for submitting to their repo. I was really excited to find such a nice repo to contribute to, but i suddenly had to reconsider when i found this:

A few months ago I bought an e scooter to get from home to work.

The backstory to this:
My car broke down on the highway, my sister's car broke down on the highway and we didn't have another car apart of my dad's anymore.
Which means I had to look for another car. The cars between 1k-5k € are dogshit and when you want to register the car you have to have an appointment at a government building which happens to be closed when I'm getting out of my 8-5 job.
I had enough and bought an e scooter.

Now back to now:
In the beginning it was cool.
Could get anywhere I wanted to in combination with the Germany ticket. Except for the Netherlands where my beautiful girlfriend is.
There I can legally not use it but that's ok lol.

The German government is hyping e mobility and public transportation up, but for what?
E mobility currently sucks ass with all the shit laws for e.g. e scooters and when you want to transport it in public transport, people give you weird looks, the bus driver wants you to buy a bicycle ticket even if I can fold the e scooter and more. The scanners in the bus of the German buses cannot read my German ticket for some reason and every bus driver in my city knows that and they just look at it and are like "Ok, you're cool. Continue moving", but this old grandma looking ass bitch is like "No, according to the law you need to show it to the scanner and not to me". I fucking know. I've been doing this shit for a year and you know that but it doesn't work. It says to me that I need to show it to you instead of to the scanner bc this machine is fucking dumb and apparently I'm holding the people because I started a discussion with her. This driver ... ugh. The buses in my city come whenever they want as well.
Like sometimes 5 minutes earlier, sometimes up to 30 minutes later.
Inconsistent motherfuckers and I am the one making everyone wait? Suck my donkey kong balls.

German trains... well you know how that goes. It doesn't. It sucks ass.
Every single fucking train line has a problem. Either a previous train has something, or staff is missing, or a technical error or the train driver's ass is itchy and needs scratches from his assistant. There's always something.

When I want to travelled home from my gf I spent not lying 8 fucking hours on the trains on Sunday.
Normally it takes max. 5 hours with a train and 3-4 hours with a car.
I can also go on a rant because of the Dutch train system because it also sucks, BUT they are reliable. They are there when they say they are gonna be there. 99% of the times.
In Germany it is somewhere at 10%.

Now I realized that e scooters are uncomfortable and expensive toys who need maintenance just like a car but nonetheless they are reliable unlike the public transport.
In the winter it will be even worse.

Electrical cars are way expensive and affordable electrical cars you need to keep charging every few baby steps.

I also looked at 125ccm motorcycles which you can drive if you upgrade your existing car driver's license, but ngl that's a scam. Not worth it at all.

And that's why I am looking for a traditional car now. E mobility is not there yet in Germany and public transport is not doable at this moment.

Hey guys, Today I created my first action on google assistant an it got deployed. I'm very happy and also I got the mail for the shirt. With 2 months I'll get it. I'm trying to make the action run in English and Hindi (Nation language of India) so that I can earn google home.

I want to build a home AI/assistant...Better than Zuckerberg's that the whole world could use, easily

I finally decided to get a Google Home. 😀

My roomate just got to know about Google Home and now he thinks google was the pioneer.

He never heard of Alexa 😐

Do you use personal assistants for home automation? If yes, what's your setup?

I'm thinking about setting up a RPi/similar with Jasper and bundling it up with Home Assistant, however, I'm not sure about the audio hardware yet.

After the last update, devRant has been a bit buggy for me..

App lock screen freezes for a few seconds and after that nothing works until I restart the app... :/

Single touch on home button opens up Google Assistant when devRant is unresponsive:

Not really Dev rant but bought 2 google homes. Set them up all nice and dandy and then boom.

Me: Hey google, set a reminder to buy batteries.
Home: I am sorry, I can't do that yet.

WTF ok.

Me: hey google, set a calendar reminder to buy batteries tomorrow.
Home: I am sorry, I can't add calendar events yet.

And the list goes on. WTF google. Why my phones Google assistant can do all of the above and a home assistant cannot even though they are the same thing...

Guess who is browsing actions api to implement missing functionality that should be in a freaking core...

Talking about buying voice controlled music box...

Shortumation is a better way to develop and review your automations in home assistant without needing to install a third party automation engine like node-red.

I just sneezed and my Google Home activated 🤔

TL;DR : How would you 'smart home' with privacy?

How would you go about a privacy focused home automation/smart home setup?

What I feel is not necessarily important

> some assistant that you can have conversations with.
> Not being in home network to automate.

What I feel is essential. (in decreasing order of importance)

> Being a able to control appliances/electronics with voice/app (optional gesture)
> Have features to automate stuff, like turn on something if something happens (IFTTTish)
> Easily play music from Spotify or something similar, e.g. " * Play some Tchaikovsky."
> Simple alarm and reminder features.

So far I have seen relays and other devices that you add in the wiring and they connect to wifi. They work surprisingly well, but whatever I came across also collects personal user data.

Also not aware of any google home and alexa alternative that can so seamlessly pick up commands through ambient noise.

What are your thoughts and views?

P. S. I would have picked up something like this as my side project, but I don't see my self having that much free time atleast for the next 4-5 months.

i got put in this stupid intro to computer class and it's so fucking pointless. the teacher is clueless and 29 years out of date in information, all we do is fuck around with windows and everyone acts like wow it's so amazing despite being the most basic features. this damn teacher assigns home work too and i use linux at one, NONE of my computers at home have windows and i have no intention of using either windows or os x . this teacher knows that i'm very proficient with computers and treats me like an assistant, while that's cool and all it's not within my interests. this class period is a literal waste of my time.

Fuckin damn it Google! I setup a transparent proxy and for some fucking reason Google home doesn't like that at all. I think I have a fix but it's a real fucking pain in the ass. I call your support people who I specifically tell that I'm running a fucking proxy and they tell me that I need to talk to their Google WiFi team. It has nothing Todo with my fucking wifi bitch. Its your price of shit price of crap hardware that doesn't like fucking proxies.

I'll update everyone what the fix is when I find it.

Btw, this is a HTTPS transparent proxy and HTTP transparent proxy running on my pFSense firewall box.

"Google Voice Kit - Install this image on your RPi 3B+ (or Zero depending on the kit version), pop this Hat on the GPIO pins, and press the button! It's that easy!!!"

how did this happen google

Just installed Cent OS 7 on my HP 380 g6 server, can someone please explain why hp withholds bios updates unless you pay extra... Where do I even get a support licence for this old thing. DoD normally handle's these things.

Also what do you do with a server at home. I found some AI assistant software to run and of course VM's but what else.

Is anyone else excited about Mycroft and the Mycroft Mark II? If I had any disposable income, I'd throw money at their Kickstarter cause it looks very promising.

That rabbit in my grandpa's left table drawer, in the home I grew at. I wanted to finally catch it, and kill it. I was bad with animals all along, especially this one. My grandpa died the year before I was born, and my grandma said we would've got along really well. So much to talk about, a scientist to an engineer. So, I travelled back, but my home somehow turned from a city stone-walled house into a half-soaked, decaying wooden one. I caught that rabbit though, but while I was holding it at its neck and twisting it, it somehow disappeared, distributed evenly as if I were twisting a crayon. I was trying to find it, but in that left drawer, among century-old pencils and that red liquid thermometer I played with as a kid, only a faded out, dusty duckling resided. I picked it up, and unlike the rabbit, it was paper, no, cigarette paper thin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to run away. It just turned from yellow to grey, feathers leaving my fingers covered in fine dust. I realized it will never die, dwelling and decaying there forever, happy.

I did my calculations, and I knew for a fact when and where the rabbit should've appeared. It was the middle drawer, not the left one. I opened it and looked in anticipation how something chewed through the bottom. I caught it, but it was no rabbit, it was an alive, rubber rat. The rubber was white turned grey, old, aged, dusty, probably Soviet. I poked the rat's eye with a pen rod, but the rat's body inflated a bit, leaving it invincible. It was mocking me.

Of the same white rubber, a ball appeared. I knew for a fact it was alive too, I felt the bones inside holding it. I found its lips, and was prying it open. The massive, dry mouth emerged, with a full set of human teeth, albeit wider and nastier ones. Huge eyes looked at me. It was alive, it was intelligent. It was my grandpa's personal financial assistant all along. It told me to leave the rat and the rabbit alone. He told me not to worry about the ducking, as it was in safe hands.

It made friends with my brother during the "blue age", when he was wearing thin, worn out rugs instead of clothes, tiny faded blue flowers on them, screaming and annoying my grandma he lived with in that room, not a single person other than the two in sight. The house was slowly submerging. The water was rising.

Thoughts on the new Google product line? I'm really excited about the advances in AI and assistant integration. I also preordered the XL 2 (with a free Home mini).

I am currently bored in school and at home and want to build a Jarvis like virtual assistant for both my home computer and school computer

Anyone have an idea of where I should start and the kind of things I should look into and learn

Assume I have no knowledge since

Thank you for your time

Any people around with experience developing for Google home/assistant.

Currently distracted by a headache and procrastinating on the couch watching Netflix. And I was wondering if I could develop an app that would pause my Netflix and tell me to fucking man up and get to work.

Maybe also one to get me out of bed, Google knows when I'm awake since whenever I'm awake I'm using a Google product. So no more snoozing just a swearing Google speaker that tells me to get the fuck out of bed. And won't stop unless I'm active.

I can't wait for the release of Snips Air sometime in 2019 so that I can stop using my Google home. It's not even the privacy concern that bugs me, it's the stupid shit like alarm management. To preface, I've had a Google home since late last year and since I got it the alarms have been nothing but trouble. More than half the time when I ask it when my next alarm is, it will respond with "You have an alarm for Friday at 7pm that is going off right now" (At the time of this response it was Tuesday). Then snoozing sometimes just doesn't work, I told it to snooze for 10 minutes, it worked just fine. Then today I made the mistake of asking it to snooze a second time which responded with "Sure, snoozing for 5 minutes", I wake up 45 minutes later, and ask "Hey Google, when's my next alarm?", it responds "You have an alarm today for 7:00 snoozed until 7:15". I have an exam today so luckily I didn't sleep in too late but againg this isn't the first occurence. To prevent this I normally just have a backup alarm on my phone and the one on my phone will wake me up in case something happens. On top of that though I've had rarer cases where it will delete all my alarms and I'll have to go command by command reminding of each alarm. That's just alarms though, I also have it control several IoT devices, and me having to use IFTTT requires the utmost precision in my phrasing otherwise it won't understand ( although this issue is mainly due to how the assistant service trigger on IFTTT is configured ). It still does much better than Siri ( at least my home can set alarms unlike my mac ), I have yet to try Alexa though. Of course my last problem is the hotword, saying "Hey Google" is much better than "Ok Google" but it's still excessive when I have to repeat it for each individual command. This is why I'm so excited for snips air, a set of devices that look pretty great, hackable, and as a bonus much more private that the current options. I realize that I could get a dev kit or set up snips on a pi but the dev kit isn't exactly visually appealing and I doubt I could get something that looks or functions half decent on the pi.

Tried 4 times to move the 'data disk' on home assistant to the ssd restoring my backup.
This last time I let it run for 5 days and it didn't fucking work

Decided to just say fuck it, reinstalled home assistant to the yellow, did NOT restore backup, and the move to data disk took 5 fucking minutes : |

After that I restored my backup which took only another 5 minutes and now everything is just working. really wish the instructions suggested moving the data disk before restoring so I wouldn't have wasted my fucking time.

Like fuck am I the only one who had this issue?

Factory Reset my Nexus 6P, can't get Google Assistant -

So I was using the Android O Dev preview and decided the annoying things in it was just too much so I un-enrolled which reset my device, I'm now on Android N and have been for a week or two, everything's up to date and all but holding the home menu gives me the "Now on tap", I've cleared the Google app and services data/cache, swapped the language to English (US) and rebooted a few times but still nothing.

I'm not rooted and my bootloader is locked, I'm in Australia and had access to Google Assistant without any trickery before...

Not too sure what I'm missing and how to enable Assistant? So freaking annoying not having it and stuff, it was so useful and I miss it