Its_All.Lost

Because hope just breeds everlasting misery…

Automated Keyboard Light with Alexa

Since I have been fiddling with Alexa I was able to get a light working with Wemo emulation. Both on the Raspberry Pi and on the ESP itself. I am mostly using the ESP with Fauxmo to act as physical devices. The Wemo emulation being done on the Pi is for running a bunch of scripts with MQTT or (hopefully in the future) gettin’ data from sensors and such. Still trying to find a way to get Alexa to read whatever I give her from MQTT, that would be righteous. But for now I have an automated keyboard light with Alexa.

(TLDR; Made a keyboard light on an ESP with a relay that emulates a Wemo plug and is voice activated by Alexa. Skip to the bottom for the code I used.

Any who, I replaced my old keyboard light switch made out of an old telephone biscuit jack with a toggle switch. I upgraded. I can now voice activate my keyboard light with Alexa. Man I’m lazy, and man that is cool. Not the lazy part the keyboard light. I do have to admit this was not my first attempt at this build. I tried two times before I finally got it right. The first two times I was trying to use 2N2222 and 2N3904 transistors and neither would work right for me. I was able to get it all working on the breadboard just fine but as soon as I transferred it to a PCB it failed. I think the problem is with the transistor. From my measurements it keeps leaking 12v back through the base and I don’t know enough about electronics to be able to figure it out yet, obviously, I tried twice.

So the third time I used the pre-made modules I have; 5v relay module. I put together a small PCB for the ESP and a DC-DC converter and added some pins to use jumper wires to attach to the relay. Soldered the power to a barrel jack and hooked up a toggle switch and connected it to the relay. So if I flip the switch it bypasses the relay and I get light manually. Always good to have a backup. The switch will work with or without the ESP plugged in. I plugged it in and bam! It worked. I gave Alexa a few commands and on and off the relay clicked. Beautiful.

Then……it failed, it started flickering the relay. It took me a minute to figure it out. I forgot the current limiting resistor on GPIO2 for the relay. Oops. That’s an easy fix luckily. The green jumper wire in the pictures goes to the pin header from GPIO2, so all I had to do was remove the jumper wire and replace it with a 1K ohm resistor. Easy. It was getting late so I turned it off and removed the ESP. The next day I go over to my computer and I can smell the lovely aroma of burnt electronics. Fuck. I look down and I can see the DC-DC converter sparking on the underside of the PCB. Turned out to be a bad solder job on my part. Since my liver transplant I have to take a shit load of pills, and some of these pills cause my hands to shake. Sometimes it’s not so bad and other times it’s ridiculous. I guess they were shaking more than I thought that night.

So I had to rebuild the whole thing. Again. Live and learn. This time I was sure to leave extra space in my solder routing just in case. The Mark IV has been up and running with zero problems for two days now. I think I worked out the kinks. And it is awesome to be able to sit down and tell Alexa to turn on my computer room and keyboard lights. Hell with Node-Red I could even WOL my computer!

Now behold, pictures…

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Alexa Skills

Amazon Echo Dot

I purchased an Amazon Echo Dot a couple weeks back. In the past I had stated that I would never put one in my house, and generally had a distain for voice activated things. I had done a little bit of reading on the Dot and I have been getting further into home automated things. I finally had a light bulb moment where I now understand all the coding. I am now dangerous. Haha.

Logically the next step was integrating Alexa with my custom build devices. All of my devices work off an ESP or Raspberry Pi (or will). I found Fauxmo Wemo emulation which is fantastic. That covers about 60% of my use, a simple off and on. But for things like my temperature sensors, hyrgrometers and water lever sensors I need to be able to pull data and have Alexa read it back. Like “Alexa, ask server for the temperature.” Or “Alexa, ask the garden for an update.” All of my devices communicate via MQTT. I started with Node-Red without Alexa so this is the direction I went. I still think it was the best route to go. All I need is an Alexa skill to read back different inbound MQTT topics (for different devices). I can’t believe there isn’t a skill already out there to read back MQTT data or homebrew temperature sensors. Or is there and I haven’t found it yet? The majority of the available Alexa skills fucking suck. There are very few actually useful skills to use. The majority of the skills I have seen are garbage. One off skills you would use once or twice then forget about. More Alexa joke skills than there needs to be.

So I started looking into making my own skill. This is what I have found to get started with creating a skill.

  • You need an Amazon AWS Developer account
  • You need access Lambda
  • You must subscribe to basic free tier of service
  • You must subscribe to Amazon EC2, which is only free for one year.

So is this a catch with using custom skills and Alexa? Will my skills then start costing me money after 12 months. If I cancel after 12 months do I lose all my skills? I’m thinking yes, I will bet you Amazon is planning on cashing in on this later? Or is it already that late in the Echo game that I am just being unfoundedly paranoid?

I have not yet created a skill. Javascript is not my forte and I haven’t sat down to dig in to this yet.

 

Some info that I found hard to find:
https://forums.developer.amazon.com/articles/45945/where-do-i-find-the-alexa-skills-kit-trigger-event.html

Great walk-through on creating a new skill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt9WdE5kR6g

ESP-01, MQTT and an OLED (SSD1306)

OLED ScreenIt took me about a week to get this going. There are still a few kinks that need to be ironed out, or worked around. But I wanted to get this out there before I forgot about it. I could not find a sketch for using an Arduino or ESP with an OLED and MQTT. Not one that didn’t just display data from a connected sensor., that is not what I wanted. I wanted to be able to send messages to the OLED screen via MQTT. I spent quite a while looking for it and I couldn’t find anything. About a week or two ago I finally broke the wall that was keeping me from sending and receiving MQTT message on an ESP. So I took that code and the working code from the Adafruit OLED sketch and made a baby.

I was able to produce a sketch that will simply display any text received via MQTT. Perfect. I plan on using this cobbled together with Node-Red. That way I can have one screen and send multiple sensor readings to it with minimal coding and parts. There are a few things I still need to figure out. For example I can’t get the screen to clear. Perhaps thats what the OLED reset pin was for? But my OLED only has four pins; SDA, SCL, Vcc and Ground. No reset. What to do? I think that is actually the only thing I need to work out. The Adafruit code will wrap your text to new lines, so make a note of that. I have gotten around clearing the screen by injecting spaces via MQTT. Its a little more effort in Node-Red for now until I get that down. But it works. It doesn’t matter how you get there as long as you get there right?

I Program the ESP via the Arduino IDE, if you don’t know how to set that up take a stroll down Google lane. Tons of help there on that topic. As it stands in the code below, once powered up the OLED should flash the Adafruit logo until a message is received then it will display the message until a new one is received. Simple. The default topic is “inTopic”, and the default OLED font size is 1. I have tried a font size of 2 but no higher. I also stumbled upon this library here. Much smaller and designed just for text. May try that in the future, but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Items Required:
(1) ESP-01 (mine is a standard ESP-01 from eBay)
(1) OLED I2C Screen (I used a 0.96″ 4pin OLED also off eBay)

IDE Library Requirements:
Wire
Adafruit GFX
Adafruit SSD1306
ESP8266WiFi
PubSubClient

Some places that helped
https://learn.adafruit.com/monochrome-oled-breakouts/arduino-library-and-examples
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-GFX-Library
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-gfx-graphics-library/using-fonts
https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-gfx-graphics-library/graphics-primitives
https://github.com/knolleary/pubsubclient

This was the tutorial that helped me get what I have going. I couldn’t get the OLED to work quite right until I came across this post. I used it as the base for what I have.
http://randomnerdtutorials.com/guide-for-oled-display-with-arduino/

This page helped but not until I specified the SDA, SCL pins for the ESP. I couldn’t get the display to work properly and do what I wanted.
http://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp8266-0-96-inch-oled-display-with-arduino-ide/

And the code (below): [See the comments for updated code]
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MPU6050 on an ESP8266-01 via MQTT

Update 3/16/17: I added code at the end of the post for dual MPU6050s
Update 2/2/18: Added images of possible wiring examples for ESP-01 and NodeMCU

Another milestone for me. I’m on a fucking roll! I found an Arduino sketch that takes an MPU6050 on an ESP8266-01  and spits it out data via MQTT. I have been looking for this and trying to accomplish this for months. My end goal is a clothes washer and dryer monitor for the family. There are sketches out there for laundry monitors but they don’t have what I need, mainly multiple users…I digress. So I found the script and it works, but some of it was it Italian which made it confusing for me and it did clumped all the sensor data into just two categories; accelerometer or gyroscope. I need more detailed information so I hacked it up a bit and it works!!

I commented out some stuff that was not needed (it all works for me YMMV), and I split all of the sensor data up into their own MQTT topic. So you get topics for AcX, AcY, AcZ and GyX, GyY, GyZ. This allows me to just use the sensor that works for the washer or dryer. Made it really easy once I plotted the data to a line graph.

Code below:
Originally taken from here

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I2C Scanner for ESP8266-01

I2CI am semi new to programming electronics. Straight amateur thats for sure, but I know enough to be dangerous. I have been trying to figure out how to get my MPU6050 sensor to work with the ESP-01. I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me. I have tried all kinds of things. I started this endeavor back when there was no Arduino IDE support for the ESP (a while ago). It was AT commands or LUA. Now that the Arduino IDE can be used it makes things much easier (I initially had issues getting it to work on my Mac). But sometimes there is a catch. I have noticed that most of the Arduino sketches will work but with a small minor tweak here or there. For example most tutorials I have found people are using the ESP8266-12. The model 12 has multiple pins available for TX & RX, the 01 model does not. The 01 model is the cheapest and happens to be what I have.

I found out it was pretty easy to change the sketch to get it working, most of the time. In the case of say I2C you have to specify the pins used for communication. The 01 only has two free pins, GPIO0 and GPIO2. Those can be used as inputs/outputs for a relay or say an LED. Or, you can use them for I2C communication. You need to specify the pins used in the sketch though. I am pretty sure this is beginner stuff, but hey I just figured it out.

Load up the default I2C scanner sketch and where you see Wire.being()  change that to Wire.being(0,2)  and you are now good to go. That should get you going on almost any I2C based sketch for Arduinos. You wont be able to use the pins for input/outputs (as far as I know) but now you have I2C.