This project has 4 components:

1. The Arduino Script billy-bass-arduino.ino
2. A serial port reader script serial-read.py
3. An Internet of things server
4. Alexa Skill

Going in order:

The billy-bass-arduino.ino script allows an Arduino Uno to move a servo in response to an audio signal and also read a light sensor and DHT11 sensor. The configuration needed is

• the audio analog signal to be fed into port A1
• an LED output to be coming out of PWM port 10
• a servo to be going out of PWM port 6
• a light sensor output being fed into analog port A5
• Digital port 2 to be used for the DHT11 sensor output.

In order to publish data to the IoT Server a request must somehow be made to the IoT server to the /update route with the URL query parameters light, humidity, and temperature. E.g.

GET ping-tester-ese190.herokuapp.com/update?light=90&humidity=40&temperature=20

This can be done either by modifying the Arudino script to include the Ciao library (and using an Arudino Uno Wifi) or by reading off the values with the serial-read.py script.

To use the script, run python serial-read.py in a terminal tab. This call will instantiate a running loop that will check for any USB devices connected to your computer (tested on a mac) that contain a substring cu.usbmodem. Upon finding such a device, it will read data published to the Serial channel at baudrate 9600 (ie the sensor values) and publish the values to the IoT server.

To run the IoT server, run npm install followed by npm start. The only dependency is express. To test whether data has been published to the server, visit the server getData route (if testing locally this would be localhost:3000/getData). The server can be readily deployed to heroku without any additional work. Just run heroku create and do git push heroku master.

The Alexa skill code is contained within the Alexa-BBF-Skill folder. Within the index.js script, you will need to edit line 7 to include the appropriate base url for your IoT server. Without doing this step, the skill code would not work. Additionally, the following intents must be created (refer to the screenshots).

GetHumidityIntent

GetLightLevelIntent

GetTemperatureIntent