
OTACON Update 4 - Home is where the Hass is!
It seems I only make significant progress with my automation / OTACON / Alexa stuff when I book a week off work, and this particular post is no exception to that. I mentioned towards the end of last year about veering more towards Tasker for tying in a large amount of my IoT devices and running HomeAssistant on my Pi to complement this. I talked about it, but I had not followed through on that plan, for two reasons:
- Raspberry Pi uses variants of the Linux operating system, the command line of which I was not particularly well versed in at the time of posting.
- Configuring HomeAssistant, even with all of its simpler options and all-in-one installer still required (or needed researching) an understanding of YAML, a serialisation language that I’d never come across before.
Well, with another week off I could hardly sit on my hands, and I decided to rectify these obstructions. I won’t bore you with the details of learning more about Linux and it’s command line (for those in the know, all I need say is “Over The Wire” helped significantly), and instead focus on how the week has shaped up and the end result of that work.
“She’s my Jessie Pi..” ♫
Over my previous experimentation with RPi, I’ve run a few different OSs for different purposes; Raspbian, Jessie, DietPi, but more recently I’ve been focused on dedicating the RPi purely for the use of HomeAssistant, and since I last spent significant time with it, HomeAssistant have released their own RPi disc image that ideally runs HAss straight out of the box. Now, with their introduction of Hassbian, I’ve got the first hurdle taken care of, and HAss purring like a kitten. With a little tinkering, that looks like this:

Whilst HAss now handles a lot of the automation that I was running through Tasker (lighting, weather alerts, Chromecast), one of the key benefits is that all of that information is now displayed in a handy dandy user interface that shows not just the monitored status of all my IoT toys, but allows direct modification of those statuses. The sweetest thing about it all? HAss is open source, allowing it’s many users to contribute to its development, and integration is the name of the game; all it will take to tie in Alexa and OTACON is a little reading, a little tinkering, and a lot of imagination on the possibility for what I can do with this.
Taking the next steps into I O Tea
I spent a fair amount of time digging through YAML code trying to figure out why a lot of things did work, more why they didn’t, and what the consequences were for just a single incorrectly spaced indent (hint: it keeps the indent where it is, or else it gets the hose again). What I have right now is the display you see above, and therein lies the problem. I was running out of ideas with what I have available to me. There are four things that I know I need to put on the to-do list:
- Add HAss support through Alexa’s control panel for skills & intents.
- Find a way to transition OTACON’s current voice (Cereproc’s ‘William’ being as close to Paul Bettany as I could find) to the RPi for HomeAssistant to start adding vocal notifications to my automations.
- Research Tasker/AutoApps integration so that I can control HAss from my smartwatch.
- Play around with DuckDNS and my port forwarding so I can control things from outside of my home network.
After those hurdles, the way forward is clear. DRINK ALL THE BOOZE, HACK ALL THE THINGS. Or at least, purchase all the things, then hack them apart for fun and automation!

