Random Thoughts - Page 7 of 25

December 17, 2020July 18, 2023

Update: Creating home assistant interface to alexa playlists

I stumbled upon https://github.com/custom-components/alexa_media_player/wiki#what-this-is which gave me the information I needed to directly control my echo device, instead of having one echo command via voice another.

Read my post https://robertjwallace.com/creating-home-assistant-interface-to-alexa-playlists/ for background.

The difference between what I was doing in that post and what I am doing now is in the scripts.yaml file. The code to directly control my echo is:

December 17, 2020December 17, 2020

Ten card poker deal

There are a lot of ten card poker deals out there. The basic plot is that for the final hand of the evening your opponent suggested playing a hand of five card poker with only ten cards, but the spectator gets to choose which cards they get. You, the dealer ends up winning with a pat hand, usually a Royal Flush.

December 16, 2020July 18, 2023

Creating home assistant interface to alexa playlists

Goal:

Use Home Assistant to use Amazon Echo to play Amazon Music playlists

Resources used:

Home Assistant Community Store – Alexa Media Player

December 12, 2020December 18, 2020

Controlling a tuya smart plug from the command line

Background

I have a hybrid home automation system that includes some old X10 devices, Philips hue devices, wemo devices, and tp-link devices. Part of the system is some software that emulates a Philips hue bridge (ha-bridge) that lets me control devices by running linux programs and scripts. This lets me use old X10 radio frequency controllers and motion detectors in my home automation. So far this has worked great.

December 9, 2020December 18, 2020

Finding the Aces – the hard way

Here is something I am playing with.

The starting position is two aces on top and two on the bottom. Shuffle the deck keeping the aces on top and bottom.

December 7, 2020December 7, 2020

Texas Hold-em stacks

A couple of years ago I wrote a post titled “Finding the aces with Erdnase” where I used Erdnase’s system of overhand shuffle to stack the aces at know positions in the deck.

The positions I used were 10x cards, Ace, 1x card, Ace, 5x cards, and the last Ace. In this post I generalize that method to place the aces at whatever locations you want.

December 7, 2020September 6, 2023

Easy Riffle Stacking

In the normal method of riffle stacking you start with the four aces on top. When you do the shuffles you hold back cards with both the right and left hands, dropping the cards held by the left thumb under the cards held back by the right thumb. At each shuffle the number of cards held back by the left stays the same, but those held by the right decrease.

November 27, 2020July 18, 2023

Adding links to web pages in Home Assistant

I have been playing around with Home Assistant for just a little while now, and while I am impressed with what it does, I find the documentation and the examples to be less than helpful. One thing I wanted to do was simply add a “card” of web links to the UI. Since the Home Assistant interface (Lovelace) is web based you would think that this would be easy.

November 27, 2020June 14, 2021

Perspective on card shuffling

The largest U.S. manufacture of playing cards sells approx. 100,000,000
decks of playing cards per year. This can be expressed as 10⁸.

November 15, 2020November 22, 2020

Home automation, part 2

This is an update to https://robertjwallace.com/home-automation-smart-home/.

I am finally beginning to move from the X10 system to a more modern system, despite the cost. My existing system is an hybrid of Philips Hue and X10. To integrate the X10 with Alexa I use the X10 CM19 transceiver with the mochad linux driver, and ha-bridge, a Philips Hue emulator. This allowed me to use Alexa to control the X10 system.