[IamTeknik]’s reason for entering his home automation assistant into The Hackaday Prize is simple; we have smart phones, TVs, and even smart cars. Why not a smart house?

Like its namesake from Iron Man, Project Jarvis is an intelligent assistant with a bit of home automation thrown into the mix. The hardware includes the usual relays and door locks, but that’s just the start of it. There’s also a personal digital assistant, living somewhere in the space between the hardware modules and [IamTeknik]’s smartphone. Here, voice recognition, speech synthesis, and a Siri-like functionality is the name of the game. Jarvis is capable of answering questions, compiling reports, reading social network messages, and automating everything connected to the main base station over the Internet.

[IamTeknic] has been busy studying computer systems engineering and of course working on his project for The Hackaday Prize lately, but he was able to sit down and answer a few questions for our THP hacker bio. You can check that out below, along with a few demos of what his personal Jarvis can do.

I am a professional student studying computer systems engineering at a local university. It’s basically a merge of programming and electronics and I plan on obtaining my master’s degree in a few years.

I’m passionate about energy savings and my career in engineering. It’s the reason why a lot of my major projects are dedicated to saving energy and helping preserve the world we live in.

In the video, they destroyed a printer. For me personally, I sometimes feel that way about my 3D printer. It’s been the most problematic piece of equipment for me and sometimes you can waste days trying to get an essential build out of it however, when it does work, it’s extremely satisfying.

A lot of the folks on Hackaday will hate me for this but my favourite OS has to be Windows. It may not be the “hacker” OS but as an engineer a lot of software is built to run on Windows, especially industry specific software. It basically has everything I need from PLC software to 3D modelling programs for use with my 3D printer

My favourite bench equipment would have to be my desktop power supply. My father passed it on to me recently and it was his first power supply which he bought quite a number of years ago. Still works great!

I tend to favour object orientated programming languages since it’s what I started with. My favourite would be Java, I have a pretty good knowledge of it and can do a lot of cool stuff with it but C++ is a close second.

I was working on my project for a while before the competition started. I remember watching a video of [Dave] from the EEVBlog announcing it so I immediately rushed over and the contest description suited my project very well, build anything and make it connected.

• I would love to finish off Project Jarvis, my THP entry. Mainly because of the energy savings and I definitely see it as the pinnacle of future homes.
• I really want to RC a full-sized vehicle with a manual transmission just for the extra challenge.
• More importantly though, before I die, I would love to create a system which will drastically help generate energy in an efficient and eco-friendly way.

There were around 800 entries so I couldn’t view them all however all the ones I did see, were fantastic. If I had to choose, I would’ve liked to see more DNA related projects.

So far the project is going along quite well. I have just built a 7″ touch screen tablet running Linux which is to be mounted on a wall. It’s going to be a controller for things like media, interacting with the A.I, ordering groceries and much more. I’m also working on improving the energy savings so that, along with a few more features should be ready for the judges soon. There are a few problems, one being the loss of support for the speech API however I have gotten around that by using my mobile device for speech. It should suffice until I get the speech recognition up and running again. The biggest delay has been my 3D printer, tonnes of reprints, configuration issues, model issues and plenty more which seizes development for some time.