I have a few power sockets that can be switched wirelessly, mainly Energenie devices triggered by my Raspberry Pi. I’ve had a web interface for ages, and some automation around things like sunrise/sunset, but I’d been meaning to add voice control to save me requiring a device to hand.

Obviously Alexa is hosted on Amazon’s servers, so any command from the Echo was going to outside my own network. Marketplace for old domains. I needed to get it back inside, to trigger the code on the Pi, but I wanted to do that without exposing any URLs or potential data breach opportunities.

I found a few tutorials that showed how to do it by setting up your own Alexa Skill in AWS Lambda, combined with Amazon’s IoT option, but this seemed like a lot of effort. Instead, I was trying to find the right combo of services that would knit together. In the end, a combination of IFTTT, Beebotte and a custom Node script running on a local machine did the job.

Integrating with Alexa

IFTTT was a simple selection as it already has Amazon Alexa listed as one of the services it integrates with.

A bit of research also highlighted the ability to accept and hit webhooks. So I could set up an Applet in IFTTT to listen for a command on my Echo and make a call to a URL that included a command.

To do that, simply select Amazon Alexa for the ‘this’ part of the Applet, then authorise integration. Once done, pick a “Say a specific phrase” trigger.

MQTT – Beebotte

Originally, the plan was to self-host a script to send a message via XMPP/Jabber when the URL was hit. I currently have a basic bot set-up by way of a Node script connected and listening for messages. Triggering a message using PHP seemed to be a bit of pain, so I turned to MQTT.

It was something I had been meaning to look into for a while and this proved a useful opportunity. Continue reading…

Reading Brandur Leach’s article about Learning From Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces I found myself agreeing with many points, though not all. While I don’t agree that terminals are the answer to user interfaces, I was very keen on some of his points, notably:

We should be honest with ourselves and call out design anti-patterns that promote flashiness at the expense of efficiency.

I have found myself increasingly frustrated by bloat, whether in the form of stupidly large web pages that take forever to load while forcing the content to tip-toe around interactive elements, or simple apps that strain a last generation tablet.

I wrote a feature a while back about how I had tried to revive my 2012 Nexus 7 by switching to a different ROM (operating system essentially). I’ve been reasonably pleased with the switch but it’s far from perfect. It’s faster than the native Android ROM, but still a little sluggish.

Now, you could argue that it should be because the device is now more than four years old. In computer terms it’s more than a generation out of date, making it a virtual relic. Two more cycles of Moore’s law have passed since then, meaning recent devices are four times more powerful, in theory.

As I keep arguing though, we long ago passed the point of powerful enough. What all that extra grunt — which few people actually need — is doing is simply making developers lazy. Although it could also be that they’re driven by the new shiny too.

Instead of adding a flashy transition, or a higher definition image, or video to everything, why is no one focusing on speed?

The answer, I suspect, is that they’re all testing on super-high-spec development machines, or latest generation devices. Why spend time debugging a routine or looking for more efficient ways to do things — which often require a lot of creativity and clever-thinking — when you can just throw hardware at the problem?

Why worry about all those landfills pumped full of old devices that can no longer keep up? That’s not their problem. In fact, if you work for a device maker your job is to help move units. If anything, you want to make existing devices obsolete the moment a new one is launched. Slowing it down is one way to do this. Continue reading…

Let me start by saying that I like the Raspberry Pi, I own four of them. I’m also a big fan of the Foundation’s aims. The title of this piece is pure click-bait.

That said, I happened to be perusing the second-hand listings for computers on eBay recently, in response to a forum post, and was amazed at how much you can get for not a lot of money. The prices were so reasonable they got me thinking.

It must be something about January, as I have written before about the price of second-hand PCs, back in 2013. I’ve also asked where the cheap computers were, because prices seem to stay pretty static for new computers, with very little change in real-world performance.

That means you can pick up a lot of machine for little money. How little? Well cheaper than a Raspberry Pi.

The Cost of Pi

The Raspberry Pi was designed to offer an affordable computer to encourage tinkering and learning, and it does. The Pi Zero retails for around £4 ($5), if you can get hold of one. They go up to about £30 for the most powerful model (the Pi 3 Model B at the time of writing).

That is just for the board though. To actually use it you also need:

• Case
• Power supply
• Storage (SD card)
• Monitor
• Keyboard and mouse

For the purposes of this exercise I assumed we were using an existing monitor or TV (as the Pi was designed to). I also decided to ignore the keyboard and mouse as the cost cancels out regardless of which option you choose. Continue reading…