Category: Kiosk

In the previous post, I outlined the Home Dashboard touchscreen for controlling lights, temperature/humidity, displaying Amazon Echo information, displaying who’s home (via bluetooth sniffing), and displaying what was being watched on DirecTv.  As this dashboard is intended to be a sudo remote control for my home, I thought it made sense to be able to actually control the TV with it.

After a bit of tweaking and some UI work, the end result is a super-quick (HTTP response is ~30 milliseconds which feels nearly as quick as the standard DirecTv remote) interaction between device and DirecTv receiver.
From my home dashboard/touchscreen controller, I can select the title that’s currently playing to launch the remove control (pictured above).  You’ll notice that the touchscreen controller can do everything the standard remote can do, including guide browsing, DVR browsing, etc.

After creating a desktop home automation dashboard and, later, a live stream “digital picture frame”, I got the idea to combine the two into an always-on control panel that condenses everything I care about into a single kiosk which can sit on my end table or nightstand.

What it does

It’s essentially a condensed UI of the desktop version linked above which uses the same databases and processes.

• Current indoor temperature and humidity (via DHT11 sensor)
• If my Amazon Echo is playing music, it’ll display the artist, song, and album
• If I’m watching TV, it’ll show the title, channel, and image/movie poster
• Display unique icons for each person in the house (by sniffing for their phone’s bluetooth signal)
• It’ll show the status of my lights (on/off) and update if that status changes (using the Wink API)
• Through touch screen, allow me to control my lights in near real-time.

Materials Used

• A Pi3
• Pi display
• A case
• Indirectly, I also engage my Wink Hub, Amazon Echo, and DirecTv receiver.

How it works

Much of this (temperature, humidty, DirecTv and Wink control) is covered in “The Foundation” post.  Specific to collecting information from the Amazon Echo, I use IfTTT and the Maker channel.  Each time my Echo plays a song, I POST to a script similar to the one below which stores the song in a MySQL database.  I can then query that, determine if the song is still playing, and publish it to the UI.

<?php
$conn = mysqli_connect(<credentials>);
if (!$conn) {
die("Connection failed: " . mysqli_connect_error());
}
$song=$_REQUEST['song'];
$artist=$_REQUEST['artist'];
$album=$_REQUEST['album'];
$timestamp=$_REQUEST['timestamp'];
$sql = "INSERT INTO echo_history (artist, song, album, timestamp)
VALUES ('$artist', '$song', '$album', '$timestamp')";
if (mysqli_query($conn, $sql)) {
echo "New record created successfully";
} else {
echo "Error: " . $sql . "<br>" . mysqli_error($conn);
}
mysqli_close($conn);
?>

My Maker recipe looks something like this: IF then to URL

recordmusic.php?artist= {{ArtistName}}&song={{SongName}} &album={{AlbumName}} &timestamp={{PlayDateTime}}

Method POST.
That’s about it for the controller – quite simple and is probably the most practical project I’ve done thus far.