When you’re obsessed with your smart home, you want to show it off. While a light bulb that turns on when you walk into a room is useful, it doesn’t really have much of a wow factor. Often, it’s the utterly pointless projects that are the most fun to show off.
Create a Star Trek communicator badge to control your smart home
Two to beam up
I’m unashamed to say that I’m a card-carrying geek, and to my mind, this is one of the coolest Home Assistant projects I’ve seen. If you’ve ever watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, you’ll be aware of the communicator badges that the crew wore. You tap the badge and say, “Picard to Riker,” and you can start talking to that person.
In college, a computer science major used to wear one of these communicator badges all the time. I once tapped it and said, “two to beam up,” before complaining that his combadge didn’t work, thinking that this was hilarious. He looked at me like I was a total idiot and said, “It’s DNA-activated.”
A total genius on the Home Assistant forums has made the communicator badge a reality, using a magnetic prop badge stuck onto an M5StickC PLUS2. The built-in accelerometer detects when you tap the badge, the M5StickC PLUS2 records the voice command, sends the audio to a Whisper-compatible voice transcription service, and then passes the text to Home Assistant’s conversation integration.
You can tap the badge, give a typical smart home command such as “turn off the living room light” and it happens just as it definitely would on the USS Enterprise. The creator has put everything on GitHub, with setup instructions, a configuration guide, and some troubleshooting help, so if you want to build your own, a lot of the hard work has been done for you.
5 Home Assistant integrations that make my smart home feel like it came from the future
The future is now, old man.
Build a talking toaster that starts the conversation
Presence detection instead of a wake word
If you’re a fan of sci-fi like Star Trek: TNG, then you may also be aware of the classic British sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf. It tells the story of the last surviving human who wakes up from stasis three million years in the future, with only the hologram of his annoying long-dead bunkmate, a humanoid life-form descended from the ship’s pregnant cat, who evolved over the course of the three million years, and the ship’s senile computer.
A recurring character is Talkie Toaster, a smart toaster that really desperately wants everyone to make toast and begs them to do so with sickening enthusiasm. A Home Assistant user has made their own version of Talkie Toaster by putting an ESP32 inside a real toaster with a microphone and a speaker and using an LLM as the conversation agent and ElevenLabs to generate the voice.
The toaster will ask you if you want some toast, and you can hold a conversation with it if you want to. The clever part is that instead of using a wake word, the talking toaster is triggered by a motion sensor. It means that when you go near it, the talking toaster will automatically ask you if you want some toast, exactly like the real Talkie Toaster.
It’s an utterly pointless project, and one that I’m definitely going to try to build myself. Why the smeg not?
Give your coffee table an attitude
A vibration sensor and text-to-speech make your table come alive
Do you like the idea of giving inanimate objects personalities and the ability to speak, but you’re not a fan of toast? What about building a talking coffee table called Greg instead?
This is a similar idea to the talking toaster, but it relies on an external media player so that you don’t have to try to embed a speaker into your best coffee table. While Talkie Toaster uses a cloud-based LLM to generate the text of the spoken responses, Greg has all the responses built in, with 125 different lines. You could, of course, replace these with AI-generated responses instead to make it more versatile and interactive.
Once again, this project doesn’t rely on a wake word. Instead, it uses a vibration sensor stuck to the table. Greg is triggered by vibrations and reacts differently depending on the strength of those vibrations. There are different reactions for minimal, medium, and high levels of vibration, a reaction after a continued period of silence, and a random existential crisis mode that occurs unprompted if vibration has been detected recently.
You can install a ready-made integration for Greg via HACS, but the concept is such a simple one that you could just as easily build your own from scratch. That way you can give it the exact personality that you want.
Home Assistant is meant to be fun
Not every Home Assistant project needs to serve a serious purpose. I mostly tinker with Home Assistant for fun, and I’m definitely going to be trying some of these projects. They’re pointless and dumb and that’s just the way I like it. Picard out.
