Smart Home Brains Raspberry Pi’s

The Brains of this operation. Why use one brain when you can use 2!
Raspberry Pis are great to give you extra flexibility when it comes to home automation and smart home integrations. Technically, you can get away with just using hubs and voice assistants most of the time but sometimes the functionality that you want in your home just isn't available just using hubs and assistants.
For instance when the Ikea Smart Blinds were released in the UK I was the first in line at my local IKEA store to pick up some to try them out. When I got them set up and working through the IKEA app I thought great, now to get them working with alexa, only to find that that ikea hadn't added voice control for the blinds yet, you could only control the ikea light bulbs from Alexa. By using the raspberry pi I was able to utilise the API for the ikea tradfri hub and write a simple script to open and close the blinds. I was then able to trigger this script through a Philips hue emulator, again running on the Pi. This then showed up as a device in the Alexa app.
Ikea blinds are now officially supported by the Alexa app but I had this working a couple of days after the blinds were released and didn't need to wait for the function to be added by the developers.
I use raspberry pis to add quite a lot of additional functionality to my smart home so stay tuned for more later on.

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