Voice Controlled Smart Home

If you utter “Siri”, “Alexa” or “OK Google” in Jonni Bidwell’s home, all the lights go off and the router disconnects.

Yep, we’re pretty cynical about voice assistants here at LXF Towers. Our (nameless) sister magazines rant and rave about the latest Alexa additions and how they make ordering tat from Amazon even easier. They quietly forgive the chaos that ensues when Siri’s name is spoken on the television, as all the fruity phones within earshot frantically start offering to help.

Tech pundits wax lyrical on the importance of shoving a network stack deep into every single appliance in your house so that it can be ‘smart’, so that the ‘smart’ appliances can all chatter among themselves about their dumb masters. If you’re in the isolated enclave known as the UK, your utility providers would dearly love you to have smart meters installed.

They tell you this will help monitor your usage, save money and not be subject to wildly varying usage estimates. That may be true in individual cases, though we bet a lot of people will find their water bill increasing post-smart meter. But mostly it’s because they can generate more profit by not having to pay people to drive around reading meters. Instead they’ll have to pay people to drive around fixing them on a regular basis.

Be that as it may, voice assistants and network gadgets are here to stay, and as the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ’em, make an open source equivalent and have said equivalent control your home. So here’s our guide to the FOSS-powered smart home, featuring the Mycroft voice assistant, openHAB, Home Assistant and more. Let’s get to it…

Introducing Mycroft

A Pi-powered, friendly-looking home helper on the scene. Actually, there are two – and you can use their code.

The Mycroft Mark 1 launched in 2016 and was powered by a Pi 2, but things have moved on and it now ships with a Pi 3 at its heart. It’s a