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Comment by antoniomika | Hacker News Reader

I made a smart home skill for my dorm room. I didn't have any wifi enabled lights, but I created a little IR adapter for some RGB LEDs around the room, and the TV. Ultimately, I was able to ask for the lights in different settings, control the TV (including setting the channel and changing inputs). I eventually want to make it able to control some simple aspects of the Chromecast like the Google home can.

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I'm emulating Belkin WeMo instead for my lights with a raspberry pi. No Amazon dev account required and it has native support.

https://github.com/n8henrie/fauxmo

(Not my project.)

The one thing I've learned about smart home is if you come up with a cool idea of how to do it DIY, someone's done it similarly and better. Wrote my own code for everything and ended up ditching it all for HomeAssistant.

I wish I would've known about that before I started... I went into it with the idea of creating a web interface to control everything, and adding in the voice control was easy because I was already using Google auth for the web interface. If I end up adding support for more things (buying some cheap RF controlled switches and creating a module for that), I might go the route to port everything over.

I'm doing exactly the same thing. I also use t to turn on control my Xbox and TV. Just turning them on and off for now. It's great :)

Love this! I made a similar IR controlled "API" to toggle my in-window air conditioner on/off last summer.

Btw, I don't think the Google Home can actually control Chromecast. They advertise it but each time I've tried stuff like "Okay Google, mute my TV" or "Okay Google, turn off Chromecast" it's said something along the lines of "Sorry, I can't do that yet, but I'm getting better every day". I switched off the Google Home after 2 weeks back for the Echo, so maybe it's gotten better.

The Google Home definitely supports Chromecast now [0].

My favorite related thing to say is "Hey Google, play House of Cards on my TV", and it will turn on my TV and then start playing the next episode from Netflix. Perfect for when I'm walking over to the TV with my dinner.

[0]: https://blog.google/products/home/google-home-holidays/

Thanks for the info! Perhaps in the new year I should consider taking my Google Home back out of its box and giving it another shot. I really wanted to like it, I am an Android dev and feel comfortable in the Google ecosystem.

Out of curiosity, do you know if the the flow I describe works now? The link (and your comment) discuss putting content on the TV. The link says you can do:

> even control your media with commands like “Pause this episode”, without lifting a finger.

but that didn't work for me 3 weeks ago, does it work now?

It definitely works! I haven't tried muting explicitly, but I've been able to control play/pause and volume well. This past weekend I tested out the development of actions on Google and the development of skills is more or less similar. The documentation still needs some work but overall the experience was fairly straightforward.

Confirming - I'm using it that way right now. Sometimes if you're doing something funky you have to explicitly specify the name of the chromecast. ("Pause the kitchen speakers"). But for the most part, it just works.

Simalrly, I haven't been able to get my Echo to talk to my FireTv Stick

Sounds really cool, if price was a roadblock for you here's a tutorial I wrote on using RF switches:

https://www.hackster.io/awshome/awshome-home-automation-usin...

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