Hey there,
Thanks for your replies, really really helpful.
It did make me chuckle as I was trawling through the LINKS forum the past day or so (for some reason the search facility always brings up zero results) and every now and then would come across one of your posts relating to how you set up the above - in pretty much every one you asked a question and then had figured it out yourself before anyone else had replied!
I’ve only been tinkering for a day so haven’t got far at all, but it’s already far superior to my previous set up. One of my primary goals was to banish the eight thousand remotes that were needed at home: TV, DVD, Apple TV, TiVo, Xbox, HDMI Splitter, every time I wanted to change what I was watching it was a 12 step process. With an orvibo ir blaster I had setup up openhab to control all of this. I have workflow on my iPhone so that I can drag down the notifications window and hit the “watch apple TV” button, which is ok, but still requires finding my phone, fiddling with it etc. I set up homekit so that I could say “hey siri, watch apple tv” which worked well, but again required my phone present, wouldn’t always hear me, and if I wanted it to work with different phrases I would have to manually input every possibility.
With very little effort, LINKS now controls this much more easily, with no need for my phone and without the need to remember the one specific phrase that works. Plus the added bonus of LINKS responding to my commands with whatever randomised collection of “hilarious” responses I choose to program it with.
My next step is to move on from LINKS (mine is called Computer) being simply a switch flicking machine, to being able to provide feedback, such as giving me the outside temperature, indoor humidity, CO2 levels etc on demand. Sorry, I’d forgotten that you gave a detailed explanation of how you did this in the original post - that’s exactly what I was looking for. So the next step is to set up some rules and generate the required strings to send back to LINKS.
I agree with you in that I would much prefer to do this in openhab. I don’t envision switching away from Openhab any time remotely soon, but there may be another front end that appears that I decide to change to at some point. It should be a case of just amending the httpgetrequest to whatever the new system uses and the whole thing would be up and running. If the response generation was done in LINKS and then I swapped this out, you’ve got to start again from scratch.
If you are happy to share your scripts then they would be very gratefully received. The last programming I did was in Pascal in 1997, so my rules and scripts tend to be very messy and long winded, although they usually do what I hope! I’ll send you a direct message.
I did buy a bluetooth speaker when I ordered the compute stick. Unfortunately mine doesn’t seem to like long periods of no audio, which is the case with LINKS. By the time it figures out audio is being sent, LINKS has usually stopped speaking. So I’ve ordered a cheap usb audio speaker and a cheap usb hub - I’m hoping this won’t have the same issue. My bluetooth speaker is now also in my bathroom.
One final thing. After a few false positives of the lights turning on and off at sounds that bore no resemblance to speech, I set links up to stop listening after 10 seconds, and start listening when it hears “computer”. After the response I can then give the appropriate command. This does seem to work most of the time; after 10 seconds I can say “turn the lights on” and nothing will happen. The only issue I found is that for some reason the auto stop listening function would stop working. How do you have yours set up, and how are you finding the false positives?
Thanks again for your help with this. It amazes me that both on here no one is really using LINKS and that in the LINKS forum no one is really using openhab. I’ve seen many posts about how to operate a single wemo socket, but with openhab the same concept could control everything. For me, they seemed ideally suited.