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Building Alexa Skills for Home Automation with Raspberry Pi (Udemy.com)

Learn to build Alexa Skills from scratch to control devices in your home with any Amazon Echo device and a Raspberry Pi

4.4
187 reviews

Created by: Lee Assam

Last updated November 2022

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What you will learn

  • Learn how to build Custom Alexa Skills
  • Learn how to use Alexa to control anything in your home
  • Use the Raspberry Pi and Alexa to Voice Control anything in your home
  • Learn flask-ask and python programming for home automation projects
  • Understand how to control AC powered appliances and devices in the home using relays
  • Write programs to control relay circuits with the Raspberry Pi
  • Have the confidence to perform home automation with Alexa

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Course Description

With millions of Alexa devices being sold, learning to build Custom Alexa Skills is becoming a highly sought after skill by employers. Electronics hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers can also use Alexa to perform home automation.

There is great power in being able to control any device in your home with an Alexa. But what if you want to perform home automation and have Alexa control your lights, appliances and even any tv in your home and have complete control to customize which devices you control with your voice without spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on smart home gadgets or devices?

By using a Raspberry Pi, it is easy to interface with home electronics and devices to create custom skills using Alexa to voice control anything in your home and achieve true home automation!

This course will teach you how to build Alexa Skills that will run on any Amazon Echo device to voice control anything in your home.

In this course, you will learn:

  • What is Alexa and the underlying Alexa ecosystem that uses the Alexa Voice Service

  • We will discuss Custom Alexa Skills and you will learn the components that make up a Custom Alexa Skill

  • We then dive into preparing your Raspberry Pi for the projects we will build

  • We will describe the flask-ask Python library which we will be using to build Custom Alexa Skills

  • You will learn how to use the Amazon Developer Portal to configure and create your Custom Alexa Skill

  • We will build a Skill to control an LED connected to the Raspberry Pi with Alexa

  • We then dive into using relays to safely connect to our Raspberry Pi and AC mains power

  • We will create a Skill that allows you to control any device in your home to turn it on or off using Alexa

  • We create an awesome project that will enable you to voice control any tv in your house even it is 20 years old using Alexa

    • We will build an IR receiver and transmitter circuit that connects to our Raspberry Pi

    • We will work with the LIRC (Linux Infrared Control) library on our Raspberry Pi

    • You will be able to adjust volume, navigate channels, go to a specific channel, power on and off your tv using Alexa

    • This can be completely customized to work with any tv

    • You can add any functionality to the skill such as play, pause, rewind for DVRs or basically add any feature your remote can perform

The skills that will be created in this course can be run on any Amazon Echo device in your home. You will learn how to test the custom skills that we will build on an Amazon Echo or any Alexa-enabled device.

Along the way you will learn:

  • Basic Electronics

  • How to work with relays and safely control high voltage AC devices from a Raspberry Pi

  • How to use an octocoupler circuit to allow electrical isolation to protect your Raspberry Pi when connecting to high voltage AC power from a relay

  • How to work with GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi

  • Learn about infrared transmitters and receivers

  • Python programming

  • Learn to program for Alexa

  • How to build Custom Alexa Skills from scratch

  • How to expose your Raspberry Pi to the internet via a publicly available https endpoint using Ngrok

  • How to build projects for home automation and the internet of things that can be controlled via Alexa

No previous programming knowledge or electronics knowledge required. All principles taught from scratch!

No Amazon Echo device is required to build and test skills.

What are you waiting for? Let's learn to build home automation and internet of things projects that you can control via any Alexa Device now!

Get started today!
Read More Beginner Beginner Level product length iconTime: 4.1h

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Instructor Details

Lee Assam

Lee holds a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Master's Degree in Computer Science.

He has taught at Universities on topics ranging from Software Development to Electrical Engineering and prototyping. He likes coming up with new ideas and prototyping them using the Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms.

His passion for innovation has resulted in several wins in Hack Day competitions. He is a US Patent holder and has numerous US Patent Applications currently being reviewed. He tries to understand how the latest technolgy can be used to solve business problems and challenges in creative ways.

His hobby is Arduino and the Internet of Things. He has been playing around with the Arduino and the Raspberry Pi platforms since their inception, and he uses his Electrical Engineering background coupled with software development skills to create and develop exciting projects.

He prefers a hands-on, project-based learning approach and uses his teaching background to make concepts fun and entertaining, while at the same time educational and informative.

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Reviews

4.4

187 ratings on Udemy

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By Jeff Shantz on 8/2/2021

I wasn't pleased to see the copy/paste of the Alexa skill JSON in Section 12. The whole point of the course is to teach building Alexa skills. Show it step by step. Yes, some simple skills were built in previous modules, but this one is a bit more involved and it would have been nice to go through it. It's a decent introduction, but it really only scratches the surface of smart home skill development. No treatment of the Smart Home Skill API whatsoever, nor are concepts like device discovery covered.

By Mike Harmon on 2/4/2021

I'm disappointed that this course is over 3 years old and hasn't been updated. The echosim.io does not work and the part for testing the development skill with my echo device does not work. I am following the class as the instructor has laid it out and am in the process as debugging so I can share with others so they can have reduced frustration with this class.

By Yurii on 10/19/2020

I had a problem with installing flask-ask through pip. It was because of latest pip version(20.2.4), and flask-ask can be installed only with pip < 10. so I downgrade my pip and problem solved. it would be great if you will mention this)

By Rafael Alves de Assis da Silva on 6/29/2020

This course focuses on how you create the skill on Amazon. The code provided you can simply copy/paste. After finishing it, you'll need to learn more things, but it's great place to start.

By Gary Wozniak on 4/7/2020

Hi. I thought that the class was great. It taught me how to setup the raspberrypi and write Alexa-Skills to interact with it's gpio pins. It provides building blocks to write Alexa-Skills to use an Alexa voice enabled device like to the echodot to control anything that you can interface to your raspberrypi. Thanks Lee

By Khalid Al-ahmadi on 6/28/2019

you are the best of the best this is very nice information I love it thank you from my deep heart you are doing very well

By Mike Rose on 1/20/2019

Great course and instructor. Lee is careful to include things that may be obvious to experienced students but not to beginners.

By Nakeea Neischer on 1/15/2019

I didnt know Raspberry pi at all, this course is great, I am learning and able to keep up.

By William Ketzeback on 1/6/2019

Excellent course for the beginner on how to both build Alexa Skills and an introduction of how to create your own home automation projects. The real world examples of using relays and how to program your RPi to read signals from IR controlled remotes for TVs or other devices was fantastic. I can not wait to expand on the class to get rid of half a dozen different remotes and just control my home entertainment with voice commands. I definitely will be looking for other courses offered by Lee Assam. He provides easily accessible overview and course materials for download to the student for the course and reference after.

By Charlie Parker on 10/5/2018

Thank you, Professor Assam for a great course! Learning how to create custom Alexa skills is a valuable asset. If you recall I also was a student in your Arduino Boot Camp. This was helpful; particularly in building the Custom Skill to control a TV. What I liked most about this course was the clear, methodical pace and your detailed explanations. I also appreciate the valuable online resources and the timely responses to the technical questions that I posted to the help desk. I had so much fun building these custom skills. The course started out with a simple project to control an LED, and progressed all the way to a full-blown custom skill that allows you to control your home TV by using the Alexa app on your cell phone. How cool is that! Excellent!

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Overall Score : 88 / 100

Building Alexa Skills for Home Automation with Raspberry Pi
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  • Video Duration: icon 4.1h
  • Price: $69.99
  • Provider: icon Udemy
  • Updated: icon November 2022
  • Level: Beginner Beginner
  • Language: icon English
  • Certificate: icon Yes
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