Smart Home DIY Series: How to Control Your Home with Siri

For a long time, teasing Siri with various questions has been an important entertainment activity for Apple fans. As one of the veterans among voice assistants, Siri continues to improve and become smarter while being teased. Recently, in the short film “The ROCKxSIRI Dominate the Day” released in collaboration with Hollywood superstar Dwayne Johnson, he efficiently schedules his time with Siri’s assistance, switching between various scenes with a full sci-fi movie feel, earning applause from the audience and making Siri a hot topic in the field of intelligent voice.

Poster for “The ROCKxSIRI Dominate the Day”

Video of “The ROCKxSIRI Dominate the Day”

In fact, Siri’s capabilities go far beyond this. Apple has already distributed Siri’s development interface to third-party app developers, meaning anyone can develop a dedicated voice control system using Siri. For example, community makers have turned Siri into the smart home “general manager”, like this:

Hey Siri, turn on the rotating light

Hey Siri, change the color of the rotating light to red

Hey Siri, turn off all the lights

Hey Siri, turn on the TV

Hey Siri, set the air conditioning to 27℃

Still not enough? Here’s another set of videos

Siri Smart Home Voice Control System

Siri Voice Control Rotating Light

Want your Siri to have this capability too?

Please continue to read below

Super Detailed Illustrated Tutorial Area

(Siri Controls Rotating Light)

This tutorial consists of the following four parts:

– Home-Assistant Installation;

– Home-Assistant Plugin Installation;

– HAY Rotating Light v2 Design;

– Siri Voice Control Setup;

(Recommended reading time 5 minutes, click the end of the article “Read Original” to view the original tutorial, where you can obtain all file download links)

Home-Assistant Installation

Home-Assistant can be installed on any computer; I installed it on a Raspberry Pi 3, which is currently a common practice. The official website also provides a very simple method; just go to Installing Hass.io to download the corresponding Raspberry Pi image provided by Home-Assistant, burn it to an SD card, insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi, connect to the internet, power it up, and wait a few minutes, duang~ it’s done!

After about 20 minutes, you can open your browser (recommended Chrome), enter http://hassio.local:8123 in the address bar, and you can access your future smart home control center!

When the following interface appears, it means the installation was successful~

Home-Assistant Plugin Installation

Here are a few essential add-ons recommended for future work:

Mosquitto MQTT broker: A lightweight IoT communication protocol, essential, will be used for DIY HAY later.

SSH Server: SSH service, recommended for installation, facilitates remote command line debugging.

Samba: Samba service, essential for editing Home Assistant files later.

As for the specific installation methods and functions of these add-ons, just click their links, just like installing apps on an iPhone, and I won’t elaborate here.

HAY-V2 DIY

Preparation is almost done; now it’s time for the HAY V2 DIY section.

# Circuit

In the previous version (DIY HAY Rotating Light), we used Arduino Nano as the main control, but this time we chose NodeMCU v1 as the main control due to the need for internet connectivity and Siri control. NodeMCU is a development board integrated with the ESP8266 chip that can connect to the internet, and it’s quite similar to Arduino in development (there are also some NodeMCU posts in the forum, which you can search and learn about).

NodeMCU’s function is to communicate with Home Assistant through the MQTT protocol to control the LED, which is the HAY rotating light.

Below is the circuit diagram, which is basically similar to the previous version, with the IMU module removed.

# Program

The program refers to a program from a big guy on Github; just modify the parts I circled in the image below.

Then burn the modified program into NodeMCU. Next is a crucial step: how to connect it to the Home Assistant platform? It’s actually quite simple. In your Raspberry Pi, open the Home Assistant configuration file configuration.yaml, and add the following settings:

Then add the following personalized settings under time_zone:

If you find it troublesome, you can directly download the configuration.yaml file and overwrite the original file. Restart Home Assistant,

visit http://hassio.local:8123,

and voila, the HAY rotating light button should appear! duang~ it’s done! Click the button next to it to control the rotating light switch~

Clicking on the name “Rotating Light” will also bring up more settings, including brightness, color, etc., so you can try it out yourself~

# Structure

Since voice control is needed, the rotating function of HAY in the previous issue is not very necessary, so I made some adjustments to the structure, removing two rotating clips. The installation method is similar, and you can refer to the instructions from the previous issue; I’ll take a shortcut here.

The overall effect and breakdown diagram:

You can also view my design drawings online: a total of 4 parts, just 3D print these parts and install them. This time it’s much simpler than the previous version, and I believe with everyone’s wisdom, you can definitely complete it successfully.

Siri Voice Control Setup

Next, we come to the exciting moment~

# Homebridge Installation and Setup

After installing Home Assistant, how do we use Siri to control the HAY lamp? Here we need to introduce another plugin written by a big guy: homebridge. This is a plugin that can simulate HomeKit devices, and we use it as a bridge to connect the devices in Home Assistant with Siri. How to install it: After entering Home Assistant, open the sidebar, select the “Hass.io” tab, and then select the button that looks like a shopping bag, as shown in the image below:

Then fill in this URL at the arrow: https://github.com/hassio-addons/repository, and click save.

Then the following interface will appear; we can see that Homebridge still shows “Not Installed”, meaning it hasn’t been installed yet. Just click to install it.

If you don’t understand how to install it, you can refer to the official Home Assistant installation method for third-party plugins: Installing Third-party Add-ons. Or refer to the official tutorial for this homebridge add-on: Hass.io Add-on: Homebridge. After installation, click the “Start” button; mine shows “Restart” because I have already clicked the “Start” button.

Then at the bottom of the Homebridge page, click the “Refresh” button until the 8-digit PIN code appears in the image below; you can write it down on paper, as you will need it later. For example, mine is “741-90-907”, and the settings on the Raspberry Pi side are all complete!

# iPhone Setup

First, make sure your iPhone and Raspberry Pi are on the same local network!!! Then open the “Home” app on your iPhone and select the “Add Accessory” button; my iPhone system is in English, so just choose accordingly.

At this time, a component called “Home Assistant” will appear; just click to select it.

A prompt will pop up to select the “Add Anyway” button.

Select the “Enter Code Manually” button.

Enter the 8-digit PIN code displayed on the Homebridge page; for example, mine is “741-90-907”. Then your iPhone is set up!

After the setup, your “Home” app should have the rotating light!

Brightness adjustment and color adjustment

Thus, this article ends, and you can create your own “rotating light”. Additionally, Home Assistant and homebridge are two powerful platforms that can integrate Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s speaker products. Interested friends can take their time to explore~