The idea is to use a Raspberry Pi to connected to your profile and bringing live notifications inside your room with a notification light, In this blog series i want to look into, and work out how to make this possible and hopefully we can work together to make this idea come to live. i have some experience with the below mentioned hardware and software but never connected all those features together. it should be possible and if we could have a few people participate this project could evolve in a open source Steemit Smarthome solution.


SteemPi Mockup (USB powered, no PC needed)

The project need to be simple and low cost for other users to start with, the minimal hardware needed for the project ideally would be just the Raspberry Pi (connected to the internet), a SD card (with "SteemPi") and a LED. 

SteemPi Smarthome Notifications

Hardware Total $20+/- usd (no housing/case)
 

SteemPi Version 0.1 Features: 

The first version probably will include those features:

- Light up led when people Comment/Reply/Upvote/Transfer


- Webinterface (dashboard & settings)

- HDMI output, Automatically start up the SteemPi web-interface after booting the system and show it on a connected TV or monitor. (no keyboard or mouse needed)

Other features that would be nice to have in the future:

- SteemPi, Raspbery Pi linux distribution image (Download and copy to SD card put it in the Pi and start using it)

- Spoken notifications. Text to speech, multiple free programs available

- Voice commands. Automate actions, "Hey SteemPi, ..." (multiple free programs available)

- Optional function and not to difficult to add to the project, steam! When you get upvoted/transfers.
(the needed product to make the steam could be a air humidifier and you could add a few drops of parfum-oil.)

Most of those cheap humidifier are small and USB powerd and could 'easily' be salvaged and/or enclosed by the housing of SteemPi.

Small USB powered humidifier 

 

What is needed to build the most basic SteemPi Smarthome Notifications center?

Hardware

- 1x  Raspberry pi
- 1x LED
- 1x 1K resitor  (optional(?)
- 1x SD card
- 1x Housing

I want to put the hardware in a 3d printed housing, but this is optional it can also be put in a small plastic container/box or people can design and make there own housing, and even connect it and switch home appliances.

(if you would like to design a housing, please als consider sharing back the 3d models )

Software

This would be a fun and unique project, the hardware is cheap ( and i have laying around, even the steamer), and i can make 85% of the project work (basic function), the problem that needs to be solved is connecting to Steemit from the Raspberry Pi.

Available option founds to make this work:

Option 1. PHP/mysql (Open sql database) (controling the Pi GPIO ports (led) from the browers is not difficult and many good tutorials are available and i have used them before i some other projects) (MongoDB, SteemData?)

Option 2. CLI & scripts  (if the Steemit CLI software can run on the Pi than the LED could be controlled from within the script)  (Steemcli + some script)

Option 3. Steemit Bot software ?

Option 4. ifttt

One of the above option i think could be the solution, Maybe there are more i don't know of yet. (please comment)
 

The ultimate goal would be to have a easy to download Raspberry Pi distribution / image.  

People could download the image and put it on to the Raspberry Pi SD card, add in there username and connect the LED to the (GPIO) port.

(a idea for the name/working title could be "SteemPi Smarthome notifier")

I'm not a good programmer but i like to make and connect things and i i'm very interested and willing to install and wireup and start testing different suggestions to make this work.  (I will install the web-interface with GPIO led control somewhere this week/month, and will share the tutorial i followed)

The basic functionality of SteemPi is notifications with a LED, and this may sounds a bit basic but the potential of a full SteemPi operating system with a web interface and more digital assistant like tools could make SteemPi into a Siri/Amazone Echo like solution and the future possibilities for something like SteemPi seems beyond imagination!


For reference, one other Pi project i made:

Pi - NES Label slider





I hope this post can be a first step for our own digital assistant, please participate, suggest a better name, would you like to own one, or comment what you know to make this become a reality.