Launch a Script Using Alexa Voice Commands

In a previous post, I showed how you can build a smart mirror with an Alexa voice assistant on board. The MagicMirror software and Alexa voice assistant were both hosted on a Raspberry Pi, but unfortunately there was no obvious way to get Alexa to control the smart mirror, or deliver commands to the Raspberry Pi.

I have now found a solution that is free, reliable, and very flexible. This is done by writing an Alexa Skill that adds a message to a cloud hosted queue based on your voice command. The Raspberry Pi repeatedly checks this queue for new messages, and runs customizable behaviour based on message contents. This is not limited to smart mirror applications, or Raspberry Pis. It can be used to launch any script you want on any platform that will connect to Amazon's SQS.

Here is a demonstration, and high level overview of how it works:

and a follow up demonstrating an extension of this idea:

In this tutorial I will focus on just using this to simply turn the smart mirror on and off. Adding your own scripts should then be fairly straight forward,

The steps will be as follows:

1. Create a Queue using the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
2. Write some python code to read and write to this queue
3. Write a Lambda Function that posts messages to the queue
4. Write an Alexa Skill that calls the Lambda Function
5. Schedule a task on your Raspberry Pi to read queue messages and take appropriate action.

DIY Selfie Stick

This is a fun and very easy project I came up with while trying to build a wireless shutter for an iPhone. I knew selfie sticks could trigger your camera shutter, so I was trying to find out what information they were sending through the 3.5mm aux port (aka headphone plug) to do this.

In this process I learned that headphone volume buttons will also trigger the camera shutter!

So I plugged in some headphones with volume control, and tried to come up with a way to attach my phone to a stick. I came up with the spatula sponge elastic combo you'll see here.

Take a look for yourselves!

Markov Chains: The Imitation Game

In this post we're going to build a Markov Chain to generate some realistic sounding sentences impersonating a source text. This is one of my favourite computer science examples because the concept is so absurdly simple and and the payoff is large. This will be done using python, and your final code will look like this.

Before I explain how it works though, let's look at an example generated from the past four Cyber Omelette posts:

"The first step to attach our mirror is done by simply screw the backing with a Raspberry Pi's into the filename. That looks like installing and blinking cursor. Type the wood screws.

Gorilla glue.

Electrical tape.

Extension Cord with multiple passes of the all Together  Once it hasn't really stuck in place until all directions. Clean your monitor." 

So it's not exactly coherent, but it comes pretty close! I also built a twitter bot called mayhem_bot (git repo) using this concept. This bot imitates users and trending hashtag discussions, so send it some tweets if you want more examples.

Rat dreams of stealing the treat bag and NOT getting caught. #unlikelyanimaldreams #mayhem_bot

— Mayhem Bot (@mayhem_bot) December 20, 2016

Please join us Friday at the live pic.twitter.com/ZTHpH5WgoS Human? #cbcharbourlights #mayhem_bot

— Mayhem Bot (@mayhem_bot) December 9, 2016