“Recently I bought an Amazon Echo Dot during the Amazon Prime day for ~20€.
These small voice assistants are cheap and great for DIY Home Automation if you know what is possible and how to build smart devices.
I have an Samsung Smart TV but I wanted to make it even smarter. In this Instructable I will show you how to build a Controller for your TV to control it wirelessly using your voice. Some possible and useful commands could be:
Turn On/Off the TV
Volume Settings (Up/Down/Mute)
Switch to another source (HDMI Port, TV, etc…)
Turn on Netflix/Amazon Prime/YouTube…
In case your TV has an USB-Port that is always-on you have the jackpot! If not, you can use a a loong USB-cable or a small Power Regulator Board that steps down any voltage between 12.5 and 16V down to 5V. I used this because I already had a 12V power supply directly beneath at my bed for some LED-Strips :)
Another way and thats why I participate in the Battery-Challenge, is that my designed 3D-printed housing has the space for a 150mAh LiPo Battery and Charger Board. So you can keep it completely wirelessly!
Unfortunately though I have no pictures of it because my iPhone died during an iOs-Update and the photos were not uploaded to my iCloud :(
So the provided pictures are only without the battery inside, which I connected after the final assembly…
However, if you want to build your own Controller, here is what you need:
Supplies:
Tools:
Soldering iron
Hot glue
3D-Printer (optional)
Heatshrink
Components: (Links are only as example!)
1x ESP8266-01s Board + Programmer
1x NPN Transistor 2N2222A
1x 100 Ohm Resistor
2x 10k Ohm Resistor
1x Small Switch (NC - That’s important!!)
1x 3mm IR-Emitter LED
1x Mini Step-Down Converter
1x Micro-USB Female connector board
1x TP4056 Charging Board (Optional)
1x Mini LiPo Battery (Optional)
Further:
To build this project you need an system running the freeware “ioBroker”. This is a free MQTT-Broker that allows the ESP8266 to connect to it and share it’s data. ioBroker also has an Alexa-Adapter, which we can use to make our ESP wirelessly communicate to Alexa.
I run ioBroker on an old Laptop-Motherboard - but for small automations, a Raspberry-Pi would be enough to run it. You can download ioBroker on its official website here:https://www.iobroker.net/
You also need the Tasmota-Firmware! You can download it here: https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota/releases”