Configuring Amazon Alexa on Raspberry Pi!

Yash Indane — Sat, 26 Mar 2022 15:21:29 +0000

Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service available on more than 100 million devices from Amazon and third-party device manufacturers. With Alexa, you can build natural voice experiences that offer customers a more intuitive way to interact with the technology they use every day.

In this post I will guide you how to do it on a Raspberry Pi.

Step 1> Creating Amazon Developer Account

Open up a browser and go to https://developer.amazon.com/.
Just enter a username and password and create your account.

Step 2> Register Amazon Developer

Just enter all the relevant details

Step 3> Creating the Product

Go to https://developer.amazon.com/alexa/console/avs/products

Click on Add new product

Now fill the required details

Step 4> Creating LWA Security Profile

Click on create new profile and fill the details

Note: You can put anything in security profile description

After filling details click on next.

Copy all the details and note them, as they will be required in further steps.

IN allowed origins field put http://IP:5050 and http://localhost:5050.

IP is the IP of the Raspberry Pi where you want to Alexa service to run.

In allowed return URLs put http://IP:5050/code and http://localhost:5050/code

IP is the IP of the Raspberry Pi where you want to Alexa service to run.

Click on I agree and then continue/next.

You will get a message that Your product has been created successfully.

Step 5> Configuring the device

Open up a terminal, we will do some installations first.

Make sure everything is updated -
$ sudo apt-get update

Distribution upgrade -
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Install git -
$ sudo apt-get install git

Install CherryPy library -
$ sudo pip3 install CherryPy==17.4.0

Navigate to /opt folder -
cd /opt

Clone the AlexaPi repository -
$ sudo git clone https://github.com/alexa-pi/AlexaPi.git

Run the setup script -
$ sudo ./Alexa/src/scripts/setup.sh

Answer the prompts according to your device and OS. For Airplay support give n.

Once every detail is provided to the script, open up a browser and go to http://localhost:5050. If any error comes then check in security profile configuration that the URLs are added.

This page will come after signing in, click on Allow

You will get this message -

Now exit the browser and press Ctrl+C in the terminal.

Step Start the AlexaPi service

start by -
$ sudo systemctl start AlexaPi.service

stop by -
$ sudo systemctl stop AlexaPi.service

Connect a Speaker and Mic to your Raspberry Pi. Once the service is running start asking Alexa any questions.

Thanks

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Enable CGI in Apache2

Yash Indane — Fri, 12 Nov 2021 15:53:07 +0000

By default when you install apache2, and navigate to /var/www directory you won't find the cgi-bin folder. To enable CGI in apache2 follow this steps -

Install apache2

$ sudo apt install apache2 -y

Enable CGI module

We can find the available modules in /etc/apache2/mods-available. Here you will see the cgi.load module which you need to load.

Enable by-

$ sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/cgi.load

Now as Apache configuration has changed, reload the apache service by -

$ sudo service apache2 reload

Create CGI-script

Apache2 recognizes cgi-scripts in the directory /usr/lib/cgi-bin, so we need to place the script in this folder.

Lets create a cgi script in python that returns the output of free -m command.

#!/usr/bin/python3

from subprocess import getstatusoutput as gso
import cgi

print("content-type:text/plain")
print()

print(gso("free -m")[1])

Make this script executable by -

$ sudo chmod +x c.py

Now just curl to get response

Connect with me -

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DEV Community: Yash Indane

Configuring Amazon Alexa on Raspberry Pi!

Enable CGI in Apache2

Install apache2

Enable CGI module

Create CGI-script