Project Oasis is a voice controlled terrarium that recreates outside weather inside a box. You can talk to it to ask about weather or ask it to create certain conditions. It currently recreates rain, clouds and lighting in a self sufficient closed and living ecosystem.
This project comprises of three modules:
- Dialogflow functions
- Cloud PubSub NodeJS listener
- Arduino sketch
We use Google's Dialogflow to parse natural language for the required parameters of city, location or action. User's voice input are mapped to actions or functions exported in the Dialogflow fulfillment.
These functions use openweathermap api to extract information about clouds, rain, light conditions at a particular location. The result JSON is passed onto the terrarium using Google's Cloud PubSub - a realtime notification system. PubSub messages then trigger appropriate components within the terrarium.
We run the Cloud PubSub nodejs client in a Raspberry Pi 3. An arduino is connected over USB with RPi. On receiving PubSub messages, the nodejs client sends serial codes to an arduino.
The Arduino has been programmed through a sketch to receive these serial codes and trigger corresponding relays on/off.
Raspberry Pi 3 -> Arduino (USB Serial)
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Mist Rain Lights
[5V Ceramic [5-12V Peristaltic [5V LED lights]
Resonators] Pump]
Follow the steps here to create a Dialogflow agent. We use a welcome intent that allows the user to start talking to the terrarium. There are additional intents for the user to enquire about the weather at certain location, time (e.g: 'show me the weather in seattle') or invoke an explicit action (e.g: 'make it rain')
You will need to deploy your cloud functions which are mapped to user's actions. -> Follow the instructions [here] (https://dialogflow.com/docs/how-tos/getting-started-fulfillment) to enable the cloud functions for firebase. -> Steps to deploy the functions from CLI are under Deploy Your Functions with the Firebase CLI on the same link
Specific instructions for terrariumDialogflow agent are here.
Setup a Cloud PubSub project as in this link
Follow the steps to create a topic. We created a Topic named 'Weather' in our project, to which we added our subscriptions. We only use pull subscriptions in this project. The subscription was terrarium was named as weather-detail
Note the project id for this project as it'll come in handy to run the listener client later.
Get your API key from openweathermap.org Add this key in the cloud functions so that those functions can ping the weather servers when the user asks for specific info.
Install NodeJS on your RPi
Navigate to the directory of your functions and the run the following in order
$ npm install
$ firebase login
$ firebase initAnd finally run the following to deploy your functions:
$ firebase deployThe deployed functions' link becomes the webhook URL for Dialogflow.
Naivgate to the directory of the subscription.js & package.json file and run npm install to install the dependencies. When you're ready, run node subscritpions.js listen-messages weather-detail where weather-detail is the subscription you created from a previous step.
Your can either use a Google Home or an AIY Voice Kit to interact with the terrarium. We included an AIY Voice Kit on top of Raspberry Pi 3 so as to interact with the terrarium directly as well.
Follow the instructions here to test and deploy your app on Google Home. You can then use a Google Home associated with your associated account by talking to it to trigger the terrarium and asking it about the weather
You can also build your own terrarium. Detailed instructions of fabrication and electronics are here.
Made by Harpreet Sareen and friends at the Google Creative Lab.
This project follows Google's Open Source Community Guidelines.
Note: This is not an officially supported Google product