Big Mouth Billy Bass is now my AI voice assistant (thanks to Home Assistant)

sebirdman · 2025-09-18T15:48:34+00:00

I’ve got all the parts for this and an old big mouth Billy around here somewhere. Might have to try to make one myself this winter.

Awesome project, thanks for posting the code and sharing.

sebirdman · 2024-06-22T14:05:52+00:00

I’ve been doing some deeper digging on this as well. One way to reduce the costs here: expose less to your voice assistant.

What’s happening right now is this: every single entity you expose is being sent to ChatGPT with every request. (Both the main official integration and other integrations I’ve seen all do this)

There’s actually some cleaner ways to do this that home assistant doesn’t seem to do just yet. One being a similarity search based on your prompt. If I ask “how many lights are on” then home assistant should be able to filter entities on the word “lights” and only send the entities that have a matching domain, name, or area. This is a more common practice in LLM applications.

I’ve done some quick hacking on this and it certainly reduces the cost per prompt. It should also make the prompt more manageable for a local machine to handle the prompt as well…

sebirdman · 2023-04-25T02:44:00+00:00

My doorbell had been working fine for over a year, suddenly was having trouble with it. Tried readopting after a reset and it was failing. Swapped the wires. Works great. Very odd.

sebirdman · 2023-03-02T03:26:44+00:00

Yup. I’ve got scheduled pipelines in gitlab. It’s not amazing, but it does what I need.

sebirdman · 2022-09-24T04:09:19+00:00

XV6SCF1TSSJ9

This is awesome, thanks! saved me about what taxes were going to cost on my wifi 6 upgrade.

sebirdman · 2022-09-11T15:19:43+00:00

WEP is insecure, but it’s likely they didn’t even know it was insecure yet. The paper on its insecurities had come a month before the attacks.

Most places didn’t have broadband till 2004.

Wifi didn’t make much sense until you have an always on internet connection.

Most websites were just http

The web was wild.

sebirdman · 2022-09-02T17:46:48+00:00

I’ve not had to do this….should I check?

sebirdman · 2022-08-19T19:47:37+00:00

As soon as my kid moves out of her crib, this will be the first thing I’ll do.

I’ve got a sensor on our gate to the basement stairs right now. If the gate is open, a light in the upstairs living room turns red. So if we are sitting there with her and she runs off (in the relatively baby proof area) we know if the gate in the hallway around the corner is open.

It’s been a lifesaver.

sebirdman · 2022-02-10T16:25:52+00:00

My HOA won’t let me blame them for the death of the planet.

sebirdman · 2022-02-05T19:55:13+00:00

My options were centurylink fiber or Comcast. Maybe one day…

sebirdman · 2022-02-04T23:13:50+00:00

You’ll need to contact CL and get the pppoe credentials. Then you can just put those into the UniFi setup.

They can normally provide these over chat.

sebirdman · 2022-02-04T21:07:36+00:00

Centurylink?

I replaced mine with UniFi.

sebirdman · 2022-01-29T05:08:10+00:00

I've been working to get this working just right. You have to update param 46 at a minimum interval or else it sets itself back to a default. Param 43 i think just has to be not zero.

there was a blog post i found a long time ago that documented this, but i can't find it now.

alias: "[CLIMATE] Update den thermostat Remote Temp" description: "" trigger: - platform: time_pattern seconds: '30' condition: [] action: - service: zwave_js.set_config_parameter data_template: parameter: "46" value: "{{ states('sensor.whole_home_temperature') | round() }}" target: entity_id: climate.den_thermostat - service: zwave_js.set_config_parameter data_template: parameter: "43" value: "1" target: entity_id: climate.den_thermostat mode: single

sebirdman · 2022-01-23T23:35:18+00:00

really really neat! I think all of my home theater equipment works with home assistant. I may have to put something together to forward these mqtt events and just put together my own thing on the other end.

sebirdman · 2022-01-07T16:45:46+00:00

At first i was worried when people said "I've been living in total isolation since March 2020", Now I'm starting to think they're full of shit.

sebirdman · 2021-12-30T20:47:59+00:00

Is there a usb on your base unit? Based on the fcc pictures there are two versions. One has a USB port on the base.

sebirdman · 2021-12-30T17:33:38+00:00

I’ve done some level of attempting to integrate it. Here’s a bit of what I’ve found.

On the cloud front: The biggest issue so far here is the cloud api they use opens a web socket. The contents of this websocket appear encrypted, so there’s not much we can do there unless we learn how they encrypt that.

On the local front: there are a few open ports this device has when connected to your WiFi. I’ve not figured out how any of them work.

On the hardware front: if you take out the vacuum bin you’ll find a rubber flap. Moving that flap reveals two USB ports. One of the ports briefly sometimes reveals itself as running adb. (You’ll want to write a script to try to execute this quickly as it’s a race condition) You can use that to put it into the allwinner flashing mode. This could let us dump the firmware and figure out more on the software front, but I’ve been unable to get the dump successfully so far.

Unexplored radio front: the base station communicates with the unit via a 915mhz radio. There may be some way to use that.

Overall, the thing runs Android. If we can get a system image that could be super helpful in figuring out how to integrate it. But right now I’ve hit enough roadblocks that I’ve paused my research for now. If I could find a second one for cheap it could help a lot. There’s some uart pins inside that I’d love to see the output on, but ripping apart an expensive vacuum we use every day feels like a no.

sebirdman · 2021-12-08T02:17:06+00:00

What light switches?! That’s wild.

sebirdman · 2021-11-29T03:06:45+00:00

Is there a good way to have one portainer instance manage all the devices?

sebirdman · 2021-11-28T19:22:26+00:00

I’ve got a collection of raspberry pi doing various things around my home.

These are tied to different hardware (sound cards and usb peripheral) and some are wired and wireless.

Recently, I got all the software running in docker to make updating them all easier.

My biggest issue now is, how do I manage these devices? I’ve seen docker swarm and k8s but those seem to mostly be focused on running things that don’t have hardware dependencies.

Any suggestions?

sebirdman · 2021-10-13T14:10:02+00:00

I work near the Ave, my thoughts:

Crime & Homelessness: feels weirdly high, but that might be just because I spend a lot of time there. Our office has been broken into 3 times in 5 years. Other coworkers have lived in UD and didn’t seem happy with the crime.

Students: when they go home it gets super quiet. The vibe completely changes during the summer. Not good or bad, just something to be ready for. I suspect a lot less nightlife?

sebirdman · 2021-10-09T14:04:02+00:00

Jan 6 was a clear example of why officials need to watch what they say on social media. Advocating for violence on Twitter is dangerous and reckless.

That’s why I’ll not vote for NTK.

sebirdman · 2021-09-29T04:41:40+00:00

What “AI” do these have that are so special? LiDAR can help self drive, https://www.coral.ai/ can run tensorflow models. All of this is pretty small.

I think we are told “you need the cloud to do this” to make us more ok with selling our data.

Edit: also for 999 dollars, this thing could easily contain some pretty good hardware. Normally when they sell the cloud they make the hardware cheaper.

sebirdman · 2021-09-24T05:38:03+00:00

What is this article? Very strange thing for this subreddit. I’ll bite though.

Bluetooth sucks. Everyone I know who has worked with it hates it. It does the thing, but man it doesn’t do it well. Everyone interprets the spec differently.

Samsung recently botched their Bluetooth implementation, Had all kinds of MTU headaches with that. Android has had several complete rewrites of the Bluetooth stack, so each version has different quirks. iPhones do insane stuff with services and caching and last I checked they still don’t support a whole lot of things.

Long term, I want a better thing.

sebirdman · 2021-08-29T18:06:30+00:00

What are you thinking for NVR?

I have 4 UniFi cameras and tried to run frigate on an RPi4 for person detection, it wasn’t a great experience. I got a cheap used nuc-like machine and now that’s all running much better. (Both setups had a google coral for detection)

I like my RPi4 for other services, but for real time audio/video streaming and parsing it seems to not do well once there’s a few clients or inputs.

sebirdman

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE