Bringing The Voice Assistant Home

January 14, 2024 by Matthew Carlson 22 Comments

For many, the voice assistants are helpful listeners. Just shout to the void, and a timer will be set, or Led Zepplin will start playing. For some, the lack of flexibility and reliance on cloud services is a severe drawback. [John Karabudak] is one of those people, and he runs his own voice assistant with an LLM (large language model) brain.

In the mid-2010’s, it seemed like voice assistants would take over the world, and all interfaces were going to NLP (natural language processing). Cracks started to show as these assistants ran into the limits of what NLP could reasonably handle. However, LLMs have breathed some new life into the idea as they can easily handle much more complex ideas and commands. However, running one locally is easier said than done.

A firewall with some muscle (Protectli Vault VP2420) runs a VLAN and NIPS to expose the service to the wider internet. For actually running the LLM, two RTX 4060 Ti cards provide the large VRAM needed to load a decent-sized model at a cheap price point. The AI engine (vLLM) supports dozens of models, but [John] chose a quantized version of Mixtral to fit in the 32GB of VRAM he had available.

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A Dashboard Outside The Car

January 11, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 11 Comments

One of the biggest upsides of open communications standards such as CAN or SPI is that a whole world of vehicle hacking becomes available, from simple projects like adding sensors or computers to a car or even building a complete engine control unit from the ground up. The reverse is true as well; sensors and gauges using one of these protocols can be removed from a car and put to work in other projects. That’s the idea that [John] had when he set about using a vehicle’s dashboard as a information cluster for his home.

The core of the build is an Astra GTE dashboard cluster, removed from its host vehicle, and wired to an Arduino-compatible board, in this case an ESP32. The code that [John] wrote bit-bangs an SPI bus and after some probing is able to address all of the instrument gauges on the dashboard. For his own use at home, he’s also configured it to work with Home Assistant, where each of the gauges is configured to represent something his home automation system is monitoring using a bit mask to send data to specific dials.

While this specific gauge cluster has a lot of vehicle-specific instrumentation and needs a legend or good memory to tie into a home automation system without any other modification, plenty of vehicle gauges are more intuitive and as long as they have SPI they’d be perfect targets for builds that use this underlying software. This project takes a similar tack and repurposes a few analog voltmeters for home automation, adding a paper background to the meters to make them easier to read.

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How To Build A Fully Offline Smart Home, Or Why You Should Not

January 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 90 Comments

So-called ‘smart home’ appliances and gadgets have become an ever-more present thing the past years, with nary a coffeemaker, AC unit or light bulb for sale today that doesn’t have an associated smartphone app, cloud service and/or subscription to enable you to control it from the beach during your vacation, or just set up automation routines to take tedium out of your busy schedule. Yet as much as [Calvin Wankhede] loves home automation, he’d very much like for it to not stop working the moment his internet connection goes down, or the company running the service goes bankrupt. This is where his journey to create an off-line alternative smart home based around Home Assistant and other (open) software began.

Although Home Assistant (HA) itself has become significantly easier to use, what becomes readily apparent from [Calvin]’s journey is that setting up and managing your own smart home infrastructure is a never-ending project. A project that involves finding compatible hardware that can tie into HA, whether or not without reflashing the firmware, resolving configuration issues and other assorted fun. If you are into this kind of thing, it is of course a blast, and it’s a good feeling when it finally all works.

Unfortunately, interoperability across smart home and similar IoT devices is still a far-off dream, even with the introduction of Thread and Matter (which incidentally are among the worst product names to search for, period), as Matter’s uptake is pretty abysmal. This thus leaves off-line smart homes mostly as the domain of the tech-inclined in search of a hobby.

Hidden Wall-Mount Table Looks Like Hanging Art

December 24, 2023 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

If you live in a compact space, sometimes you have to get creative with your furniture to make the most of it. This wall-hanging table design from [diyhuntress] is perfect for those situations where you need a table, but you don’t want it taking up the whole room when it’s not in use. Plus, it’s kinda stealthy, which makes it even more fun!

The table is a folding design, with a flat wooden top, and an equally-sized supporting leg that goes down to the ground. The other end of the table is supported by a frame on the wall, which also contains several shelves for small objects. The trick is that the table top and support are hinged together, so that they can fold up and sit in front of the shelves, essentially hanging the whole assembly from the wall. Even better, by painting a simple artwork on the support, the whole thing just looks like a decor piece with no clue as to its hidden functionality.

It’s a fun build, and one that you could easily knock out in a weekend with some basic woodworking skills. We’ve featured some other nifty shelf designs before, too. Just remember, too – a neat and tidy space is a boost to your hacker productivity, so don’t rule this out for your own use!

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Cat-o-Matic 3000 Serves Your Feline Masters

December 1, 2023 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

When you have three cats and three humans, you have one problem: feeding them on a schedule without over or under feeding them. Even if there was only one human in the equation, the Cat-o-Matic 3000 would still be a useful tool.

Essentially, it’s a traffic light for cats — where green means you are go for feeding, and red means the cat was just fed. Yellow, of course, means the cat is either half-full or half-empty, depending on your outlook.

The brains of this operation is an ATmega88PA leftover from another project. There’s a no-name voltage regulator that steps up the two AA cells to 5 volts. Timing comes from a 32 kHz crystal that allows the microcontroller to stay in power-saving sleep mode for long periods of time.

Creator [0xCAFEAFFE] says the firmware was cobbled together from other projects. Essentially, it wakes up once per second to increment the uptime counter and then goes back to sleep. Short-pressing a button shows the feeding status, and long-pressing it will reset the timer.

Wanna make a cat status indicator without electronics? Give flexures a try.

Iowa Demolishes Its First 3D Printed House

November 29, 2023 by Kristina Panos 130 Comments

It sounds like a headline from the future: the weekend before Thanksgiving, a bulldozer came for the first example of a printed home that was supposed to help the housing crisis in the city of Muscatine. Fortunately, it hadn’t been completed and sold yet.

Printing of this first house began in May 2023, and nine more were to be completed by the end of the year. Unfortunately, when tested for compressive strength, the cement mixture this first home was printed out of failed to meet the 5,000 PSI minimum required for the project. Rather than compromise on safety, the parties involved decided to knock it down and start over.

The goal now is to find out why the mixture, which met the strength requirements in laboratory testing, didn’t behave the same on-site. Currently, the plan is to start building the originally-planned second house in the spring, and begin construction on this first site after that.

The project is a collaborative effort between the Community Federation of Greater Muscatine (CFGM), Muscatine Community College, and Alquist 3D. Want to know more about the state of 3D printing when it comes to housing? Check out our handy guide.

Editors Note: The initial post initially indicated that the failed cement mixture contained hemp, but that has since found to be incorrect and the post has been edited accordingly.

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Heat Pump Dryer Explained

November 25, 2023 by Al Williams 98 Comments

Historically, having a washer and a dryer in your house requires “a hookup.” You need hot and cold water for the washer as well as a drain for wastewater. For the dryer, you need either gas or — in the US — a special 220 V outlet because the heating elements require a lot of wattage, and doubling the voltage keeps the current levels manageable. You also need a bulky hose to vent hot moist air out of the house. But a relatively new technology is changing that. Instead of using a heater, these new dryers use a heat pump, and [Matt Ferrell] shows us his dryer and discusses the pros and cons in a video you can below. We liked it because it did get into a bit of detail about the principle of operation.

These dryers are attractive because they use less power and don’t require gas or a 220 V outlet. They also don’t need a vent hose which means they can sit much closer to the wall and take up less space. Heat pumps don’t convert electrical energy into heat like a normal heating element. Instead, it uses a compressor to move heat from one place to another. In this case, the dryer heats the air using the heat pump. That causes water in the clothes to evaporate into the air. The heat pump dryer then uses a second loop to cool the air, condensing the water out so the it can reheat the air and start the whole cycle over again.

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