Switching Things Up in the Smart Home
Fed up with misbehaving voice assistants? This smartwatch project uses buttons to wirelessly control smart home devices without frustration.
While they have improved over time, voice assistants can still be really frustrating when used for smart home control. After repeating a command to turn on the lights three times, you would hope the assistant would finally get the message, but far too often it will instead blast “Who Let the Dogs Out” on your speaker in the middle of the night. These kinds of experiences have led many to question their choice to use smart home technologies. Maybe getting up and flicking the light switch isn’t so bad after all?
Whoa there! This is Hackster News and we love all things tech, so that sounds a bit too extreme. Maybe there is a happy middle ground for smart home control? YouTuber Volos Projects has recently described a perfect way to control things around the house with push button accuracy, but without having to walk across the house to push that button. The solution involves a smartwatch that, instead of using voice recognition, uses icons on its touchscreen to control devices around the home.
The project makes use of a very cool, if a bit chunky, ESP32-S3 smartwatch from Waveshare. It is completely hackable, so you can make it do your bidding, and it has an amazing 2.06-inch AMOLED touchscreen with a 410×502-pixel resolution for beautiful user interface designs. This is paired with Waveshare’s ESP32-S3-POE-ETH-8DI-8DO relay that can be accessed wirelessly to control up to eight devices. It may not have all the bells and whistles of a traditional smart device, but it can at least turn them on and off by flipping an electronic switch.
To program the watch, Volos Projects first created a user interface with the help of SquareLine Studio, then Arduino IDE was used to develop the firmware. This included the standard functions you would expect from a watch, like displaying the time, in conjunction with some readily-accessible buttons that can turn lights on and off. The watch uses the ESP-NOW communication protocol to wirelessly interact with the relay.
If you are going to flip a switch to control your devices around your home, then that switch may as well always be right at your fingertips. The source code for both the watch and the relay have been made available in this GitHub repository, and you can buy both the watch and relay for under $75, so this solution is both easy and cheap to put together. New weekend project, here I come!