HomePi – Google Home connected to raspberry pi using RSI #wc3auto

Posted on by Patrick

pi + Google HomeI am currently preparing a series of blog posts to explain, how I connected my rapsberry pi based sprinkler system to my Google home. I will share code an insights about my journey.

You will need a raspberry pi (any generation is fine, I run a 1.gen) and a Google Home, or just your smartphone with google assist enabled. The more impressive is the Google Home though.

I will explain how to setup the raspberry pi, how to obtain a hostname for you dynamic IP address, the setup of letsencrypt certificates on the rasberry pi, how to auto-renew them, how to write a plugin for the rsiServer (http://github.com/rsiServer), how to setup the server for Token based authorization, how to enable https and finally how to hook up the Google Home to the entire system.

Please give me a little time and support me by sharing the announcement, I will be back with detailled instructionssoon.

W3C rsiServer on github – automotive Web APIs made public

Posted on by Patrick

The World wide web consortium decided to create a standard for automotive APIs a few years back. Quite some discussion where going on about the technologies to choose for those APIs. While in the beginning a strong candidate was seen in a JavaScript API for automotive grade browsers which run on the so called IVI (in-vehicle-infotainment) systems, nowadays a more versatile API is the consortiums favourite.

With operating systems (OS) like Google Android or Apple iOS dominating the smartphone market and HTML5 and QT moving into the automotive infotainment world, an API is needed which allows to connect from any device and its OS to the actual vehicles API.

The APIs the W3C is designing will cover different domains. Of course accessing vehicle information from within or outside of the IVI unit is a must – we are talking about automotive APIs. Other areas of interest are location based services that would allow an application developer to access the vehicles navigation core, e.g. to feed destinations into it.

The discussions in the W3C automotive web platform group (https://www.w3.org/community/autowebplatform/) also brought up a REST interface approach that adds push to REST APIs. A reference implementation for a server is made public on github for everyone to play around with an contribute (https://github.com/wzr1337/rsiServer).

While REST APIs are familiar to most of the application developers from using web services nowadays, the approach is fairly uncommon but yet interesting for automotive applications. Especially added some push mechanism will allow application to listen for changes rather than polling them in. This is of course the key differentiator and yet a straight forward approach to make vehicle APIs usable for non-auto guys.

The expectation is to open up an eco system for applications similar to the mobile web APIs like GeoLocation did in recent years.