![]() ![]() I used Vox commando to broadcast a request to Eventghost which then sent the Tellstick request using an eventghost plugin, I was probably literally the only person in the world using their voice to control an RF switch because at that point everyone was using X10, which was way too nerdy and expensive for me. Very few of us were using our voice at that point. Have you ever used Flirc for any other kind of home automation tasks? I did some pretty crazy things with Eventghost considering I have no clue how to code! I was lucky enough to witness the birth of the modern smart home and it was a really exciting time. Just the Nvidia shield project at this point. I have two Flircs now, one connected to my PC, and one connected to the Shield. I have recommended them to people for their Playstations though. The simplicity of it really appeals to me as a non-coder. I’m always looking for ways to cheat myself out of learning how to code hahaha. This works great for tasks like playing Amazon music, using Alexa smart skills, or maybe controlling lights around the house.īut why stop there? This is a fully fledged PC. Why not control the rest of it with your voice too? Oh, sure, a person could shut down Alexa and go back to controlling things the old fashioned way with a mouse, but what if this PC is in the living room? Old fashioned controls are so awkward from the couch! Enter FLIRC. Or more correctly, enter FLIRC, the Broadlink RM Blackbean, and EventGhost. With Alexa, you can tell the Blackbean to send IR blasts of any kind. And with FLIRC, you can translate those blasts into any standard keyboard command or keyboard combination, like control+shift+5. To see how it works, check out Paul’s video: Then, with the app EventGhost, whenever the FLIRC USB dongle sends that special key command, you can launch any app of your choice, like Steam, or Minecraft, or anything else! You can even navigate those apps, if they’re something like Plex. We were so impressed with this idea that we sat down with Paul to talk about how he came up with it all. What came first, the idea or the FLIRC? More broadly, how long have you had your FLIRCs and when did you get the idea to use them this way?Ī year or so ago I started looking into ways of controlling my NVIDIA Shield with Alexa, but was sorely disappointed at the lack of functionality, so I figured I would start looking for a way to control the shield with infrared so that I could marry it up with a Broadlink RM pro. Initially I just wanted to be able to control the shield for navigation and Alexa didn’t have a way to do this natively. I thought it would be a lost cause, but I was amazed when I found FLIRC! I then realised I could create keyboard shortcuts on the Shield to do all sorts of things using button remapper, and if I paired this process with the Aberto Sonorus skill I could open individual apps too and have total control! I made a video about that here: I knew the RM pro could send infrared using Alexa so I did a quick google search to see if there was any way to convert the Nvidia shield to Infrared. I actually cut my teeth on two pieces of Windows software when I first started my home automation journey. One was Vox Commando, which is an incredibly powerful piece of voice software, and Eventghost. I linked the two together before Alexa even existed so that I would be able to control Kodi (which back in those days was called XBMC). Vox Commando was incredible for that, but it couldn’t control my lights. That’s where Eventghost came in I had a USB dongle called a Tellstick that could blast RF frequencies to turn my RF light switch on and off. ![]() ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |