2019, Fall
Fall Semester
In the fall semester of 2019, I took an IoT course that challenged us to develop a project based on microcontrollers and cybersecurity. As a lover of coffee and a strong desire to learn up and coming technology, I tried my hand at voice activation. I took a basic coffee machine and paired it with a NodeMCU ESP8266 Wi-Fi board to give the machine WiFi capabilities. The NodeMCU has input/output capabilities, so I used that to my advantage by hooking a proximity sensor and water level sensor. Now, I could monitor if there was a coffee pot available to brew coffee into and if there was enough water to brew a pot of joe.
The information provided to the NodeMCU was posted on Thingspeak.com. Using an Amazon Alexa, I developed a Python LAMBDA function that reads the data on Thingspseak.com to turn on and off the coffee machine with voice commands. The Amazon Echo device would know if there was a pot available to brew coffee into and enough water was in the reservoir to start brewing. If these conditions were not met, Alexa will tell the User and standby for further instructions.
In the end, the application became as simple as saying, "Alexa, Brew me a coffee" and voice activation would do the rest.
This was my first time working with a Wi-Fi-enabled board and it proved to be a tad bit tricky to set up. The initial setup of the board is very fragile and not much documentation is provided for the boards.
Turns out the DOUT rate was set incorrectly, thanks to some help from my peers, I was able to format the board with the correct firmware to run the code written in C. The little board is powerful once correctly formatted!