Home Dashboard using a Raspberry Pi

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.