Raspberry Pi Home Automation Terminal

Here’s the full instructions to build your smart kitchen display with a Raspberry Pi to display live video, weather reports, news, time and more. To get started you can see the full video overview here:

 

Go ahead and assemble your Raspberry Pi as shown in the video. The webcam/microphone isn’t needed right now but I included it because next video we will be adding full control and voice activation via the Amazon Alexa service.

You can use the NOOBs software found here to set up your Raspberry Pi. I advise you install both Raspian and Open-Elec so you can use your Pi to watch movies and TV as well by booting into KODI/OpenElec.  See my video here:

If you decide to use Open-Elec you can also see this video how to set it up to watch movies and add various “add-ons” so you can stream just about anything:

Now go ahead and set up your Pi for VNC access.  This way you can easily access and change your Pi from any PC in your home.  This makes it really easy to add new programs or change our setup.

 

 

Now we need to set up our website.  Go to the MKME Github here:  https://github.com/MKme/Kitchen-Pi

 

Kitchen Pi

Download the files and copy all the files inside the Web Page folder over to your web server. Setting up your webhosting/server is beyond the scope of this tutorial- Sorry. If you need to buy a hosting plan check out BlueHost.  They currently have a plan at $2.95 per month and I’ve heard many people like their service.

Edit the index.php file and at the top change the timezone to your local one:

Web Page Code

Now edit the stream URL’s to whatever YouTube videos or live streams you want displayed on your Pi:

Pi web code

Now edit the getHeadlines area to use the news feed you wish.  There are both the UK  and US BBC links as well as you can try others you wish (not tested here).  I like the US feed fine for my Canadian and US news.

Feed code

 

Now we need to edit the weather.js file.  Change the location to your location as well as the units to F or C as you wish.

mkme.org kitchen pi

 

That’s it for the page code!  Set up your pi wherever you wish and open Chromium browser to the url of your site (yourwebsiteaddress/index.php).

 

Pi page

 

Press F11 and this will toggle your page full screen and should look something like this:

mkme.org Kitchen Pi Kiosk

 

If you like you can also make a handy shell script to open Chromium automatically into full screen by using code like this:

 

pi chromium code

 

You will need to Google around for methods to make this autostart on Raspberry Pi boot as there are many ways to do it (beyond the scope of this instruction)

Remember to Subscribe to the MKME Lab on YouTube and give a like on the video if you enjoyed this project.  It helps alot!  Next week we will add full Amazon Alexa control to our Raspberry Pi and give it a tonne more functionality.  Stay tuned!

 

 

Eric

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