This article was published on February 6, 2013

Watch this guy use a Raspberry Pi and Siri to control his garage door, alarm, thermostat, lights, and even TV


Watch this guy use a Raspberry Pi and Siri to control his garage door, alarm, thermostat, lights, and even TV

Siri is great and all, but it’s limited to just your iOS devices. What if you could hook it up to a Raspberry Pi and then control everything in your house?

That’s exactly what a YouTube user by the name of Elvis Impersonator spent three days hacking together (over a long weekend). Now Siri is able to open and close his garage door, disable (and hopefully re-enable) his house alarm, change his thermostat’s temperature for his home, control the lights in his living room, and even change the channel on his TV.

Watch him do it all:

This is all possible via a Raspberry Pi running SiriProxy, which listens for commands from his iPhone and reacts accordingly based on Elvis’ predefined instructions. We’ve seen this type of hack before, but this time it’s not just one device, but a whole slew of them, giving Elvis control of his whole whose.

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Here’s the background story, from the video’s description:

I have been following the development of SiriProxy since its initial appearance in November 2011 and even got it installed and working on an Marvell SheevaPlug ARM based plug computer. I spent countless nights dreaming of the day I could use voice commands to control my home, but I was still under a long term contract on my existing iPhone. I already had been experimenting with IP2IR control in various forms, but the controller I use in the video seemed to offer the most features which the manufacturer added a REST API in March 2012.

The components for Elvis Impersonator’s system are as follows:

  • Elk M1 Gold security panel (http://www.elkproducts.com)
  • ISY99i Series X10/Insteon lighting controller (http://www.universal-devices.com)
  • Trendnet IP cameras (http://www.trendnet.com)
  • Nest Thermostat (http://www.nest.com)
  • RedEye IP2IR controllers (http://www.thinkflood.com)
  • SiriProxy running on a RPi (http://www.raspberrypi.org)
  • iOS mobile apps MobiLinc HD ( http://mobilincstore.com) and eKeypad Pro (http://blog.ekeypad.net) for iPhone/iPad touch control. (not in video)

The best part, however, is that all his SiriProxy plugins are open sourced and available for download on his GitHub page for non-commercial use. Furthermore, “in an effort to help further interest and development of SiriProxy based applications” he has created a RPi SD card image with SiriProxy pre-installed which you can grab from SourceForge.

Image credit: AFP/Stringer

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