LazyLights is a home automation project developed using Raspberry Pi 4 model B that allows you to control your home appliances in four different ways: through a web interface, using hand gestures, using voice control, and using a specific external keyboard which acts as a macro. The appliances are connected to the Raspberry Pi using a relay circuit.
I know you might be thinking that's a whole lotta features just for turning the lights on, and not that practically useful, coz who will go through this complex setup just to have the ease of turning their lights on with a 2nd keyboard?
So lemme tell you that's not even the goal.....
I just created LazyLights and added this many features coz it was COOL! Who cares about the usefulness?
A demonstration video showing the working of the LazyLights project can be found here. This video provides a comprehensive overview of how the system operates and how it can be used to control home appliances using a web interface, hand gestures, and a specific external keyboard.
The web interface control is implemented using Flask. A web server is set up on the Raspberry Pi, and it hosts a web page with buttons for each appliance. When a button is clicked, a request is sent to the server to control the corresponding appliance. The server then triggers the corresponding relay in the relay circuit connected to the Raspberry Pi, which in turn controls the specific appliance.
The hand gesture control is implemented using MediaPipe and OpenCV. The system captures video input from the webcam and processes it to recognize specific hand gestures. When a recognized gesture is detected, a request is sent to the server to control a specific appliance. The server then triggers the corresponding relay in the relay circuit connected to the Raspberry Pi, which in turn controls the specific appliance.
The voice control feature in LazyLights enables you to control your home appliances using voice commands given to Google Assistant. This feature is implemented using Sinric Pro, a service that allows you to connect your smart home devices to your favorite voice assistant. For this project, we have connected the LazyLights system to Google Assistant. The devices that you can control through voice commands include two lights (named as "front light" and "back light"), a fan, and a socket. With this feature in place, you can control your devices just by saying commands like "Hey Google, turn on the front light" or "Hey Google, turn off the fan".
The external keyboard control is implemented using AutoHotkey. It is configured to listen for specific key presses exclusively on a designated external keyboard, which is used as a macro for controlling the appliances. This setup ensures that your main keyboard's functionality remains unaffected. Upon detecting a key press on the external keyboard, it sends a POST request with a JSON payload to the server API, triggering the control of a specific appliance. The server then triggers the corresponding relay in the relay circuit connected to the Raspberry Pi, which in turn controls the specific appliance. This feature provides a cool and unique way to manage your appliances, especially when the external keyboard is dedicated to this purpose.
The server is built using Flask in Python and runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 model B. It receives requests from the gesture recognition code and controls the GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi to control the appliances. The appliances are connected to the Raspberry Pi using a relay circuit. This setup allows for the direct control of appliances based on the input from the gesture recognition or the web interface.
The gesture recognition is implemented using OpenCV and MediaPipe in Python. The code captures video from the webcam and processes it to recognize specific hand gestures. When a gesture is recognized, it sends a request to the server to control a specific appliance. This allows for a seamless and intuitive user experience, where simple hand gestures can control various home appliances.
The web interface is built using HTML and JavaScript. It provides a user-friendly interface that allows you to control the appliances by clicking on buttons. This interface communicates with the Flask server on the Raspberry Pi, sending commands to control the appliances based on user input.
The external keyboard control is implemented using AutoHotkey. It listens for specific key presses on a specific external keyboard, which is used as a macro. The keypresses on the main keyboard are not affected. When a key is pressed on the external keyboard, it sends a POST request with a JSON payload to the server API to control a specific appliance. This feature allows for a quick and easy way to control appliances without needing to interact with the web interface or use hand gestures.
The voice control feature is implemented using the Sinric Pro SDK in a Node.js environment. It's set up in a way that listens to voice commands coming from Google Assistant, interprets the commands and then sends the appropriate signal to the LazyLights server to control the relevant device. The server script is configured with the unique application key and the secret key provided by Sinric Pro, and the unique device IDs for each of the home appliances. When a voice command is received from Google Assistant, the Sinric Pro service triggers the corresponding function in the script, which sends a POST request to the LazyLights server with the name of the appliance to be controlled.