The Raspberry Pi Thread [3]

It was here, FLIRC – RPi USB XBMC IR Remote Receiver – Raspberry Pi in Canada

My XBOX can do a some of that with the Kinect and Cortana. I don't have a Kinect, yet, but I do have an IR blaster hooked up. With that I can turn my TV and cable box on off when the XBOX is turned on off. And control the TV and Cable Box with the XBOX Media Remote. Some of the functions anyway, volume up down, channel up down, etc. The XBOX remote has a somewhat limited number of buttons on it.

alphanumeric said:

It was here, FLIRC – RPi USB XBMC IR Remote Receiver – Raspberry Pi in Canada

Thank you. I'll check it out.

alphanumeric said:

My XBOX can do a some of that with the Kinect and Cortana. I don't have a Kinect, yet, but I do have an IR blaster hooked up. With that I can turn my TV and cable box on off when the XBOX is turned on off. And control the TV and Cable Box with the XBOX Media Remote. Some of the functions anyway, volume up down, channel up down, etc. The XBOX remote has a somewhat limited number of buttons on it.

Oh yeah, I remember that. And that's probably the reason why you got the Flirc? I saw Flirc on Amazon.ca for like $22CAD ( Here). Not bad. But first, I will see if I can make the generic IR remote and receiver will work.

Well, I think I did it. I was able to integrate the Raspberry Pi as a media player for Google Home using voice commands. Quite a bit of a work because of the generic IR receiver and remote control I am using for the Pi. When I say "work", I mean making the Logitech Harmony learn each button from the generic remote. I guess that's a standard procedure anyway. But on top of that, creating "activities" on the Harmony and "recipes" for IFTTT took also quite a while but it's all worth the effort after seeing the outcome.
There's still some tweaking that needs to be done especially with regards to shutting down the Pi with a single voice command. On the video below, I almost got it to shut down in one command but it missed the "power off system" (at 2:15 on the video) option by a single step so i had to do it step by step on the video. But still, doing it step by step is already a big accomplishment just by being able to "inject" all the necessary voice commands to the entire setup.

[Note: Delays in executing commands are due to IFTTT traffic (but it doesn't happen all the time). IFTTT is a cloud based third-party program.]

So, if the Internet is down, no joy?

Very cool by the way. Assume setup.

alphanumeric said:

So, if the Internet is down, no joy?

There's always the actual remote controller. Haha...
Anyway, I never had a single internet outage due to ISP issue for the past 6 years. The last one I had was last year when there was a power outage due to a car accident. Someone ran into a pole that supplies the main power to our place. :)

Problem solved. Kodi shuts down with one voice command.