Building Amazon Alexa Skills With Node.js, Revisited

A little more than two years ago, when the Amazon Echo first started picking up steam and when I was first exposed to virtual assistants, I had written a tutorial around creating a Skill for Amazon Alexa using Node.js and simple JavaScript. In this tutorial titled, Create an Amazon Alexa Skill Using Node.js and AWS Lambda, we saw how to create intent functions and sample utterances in preparation for deployment on AWS Lambda. I later wrote a tutorial titled, Test Amazon Alexa Skills Offline with Mocha and Chai for Node.js, which focused on building unit tests for these Skills and their intent functions. Fast forward to now and a few things have changed in the realm of Skill development.

In this tutorial we’re going to see how to build a Skill for Alexa powered devices using Node.js and test it using popular frameworks and libraries such as Mocha and Chai.

Build An Alexa Skill With Golang And AWS Lambda

It has been a few years since I last worked on and published an application, otherwise known as a Skill, for Alexa powered voice assistants. My last Skill titled, BART Control, was built out of necessity because of my commuting on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. While I didn’t open source it, I had created the Skill with Node.js and a publicly available BART web service. Since then I had written a tutorial titled, Create an Amazon Alexa Skill Using Node.js and AWS Lambda, which also focused on Node.js.

I’m a huge fan of Golang and was pleased to see that AWS Lambda recently started to officially support it. AWS Lambda isn’t a requirement to creating Alexa Skills, but it is a huge convenience. To make things even better, Amazon recently sent me an invitation to take part in their developer offer to receive an Amazon Echo Show for publishing another Skill. The offer and Golang inspired me to develop another Skill and this time I wanted to share my process.

Peer-To-Peer Storage With A Raspberry Pi And Resilio Sync

I’ve been slowly trying to cut down on my online file storage footprint by switching to software and tools that I’m in full control over. For example, I was once a very heavy user of Dropbox and similar tools when it came to transferring files around between my computers, but that could leave my files exposed in the cloud, not to mention it was slow due to the time it took to communicate with the remote server.

This is where Resilio Sync comes into play. Once called, BitTorrent Sync, this software allows you to transfer files between devices on your network, without a middleman, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion, like you would find with the popular BitTorrent protocol. The more devices, the faster the synchronization.

We’re going to see how to install and configure Resilio Sync on a Raspberry Pi to act as a synchronization node on your network for file storage and fast transfers.

Emulate Classic Video Games On A Raspberry Pi Zero With RetroPie

Are you into video games, because I certainly am. Did you grow up playing the classics on your Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Nintendo 64? I did, and I still can’t get enough of them. If you’re like me and love video games and want to go back to simpler times, you can actually build your own entertainment station that contains a mashup of all the best consoles.

We’re going to see how to use an incredibly affordable Raspberry Pi Zero W to create an entertainment system the size of a pack of gum that can emulate all the classics using a custom flavor of Linux called RetroPie.

Crack Wireless Passwords Using A Raspberry Pi And Aircrack

Another day and another project with one of the many Raspberry Pi devices that are laying around my house. One of my younger family members came over to try to get inspired for his college future so we decided to work on a project together. We wanted to explore some cybersecurity topics rather than programming which led us to network security.

We decided to try to obtain the password to my wireless network password using the popular Aircrack-ng software. While it didn’t find my password in the end, it doesn’t mean we weren’t successful.

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to setup Aircrack-ng on a Raspberry Pi to decipher WiFi passwords for WEP and WPA secured networks.

Create A Bitcoin Hardware Wallet With Golang And A Raspberry Pi Zero

Over the past month or so, in my free time, I’ve been working towards creating an affordable hardware wallet for various cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Right now many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are using the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet, but those are very expensive and rarely in supply.

I own several Raspberry Pi Zero and thought it would be a perfect opportunity to take what I know about Raspberry Pi and Golang to create a wallet for a fraction of the price as the industry leading wallets.

We’re going to see how to create a hardware wallet, which I’m calling the Open Ledger Micro, using Golang and a Raspberry Pi Zero.

Use Node.js And A Raspberry Pi Zero W To Scan For BLE iBeacon Devices

Earlier this month I had written a tutorial for detecting nearby BLE iBeacon devices using a Raspberry Pi Zero W and an application written with Golang. It was a great example of accomplishing something with Go and very little code.

Scanning for BLE devices is a great use case for Internet of Things (IoT) devices like the Raspberry Pi Zero W, and Golang isn’t the only great language around. I, like many others, do a lot of Node.js development as well.

We’re going to see how to scan for BLE iBeacon devices using Node.js and the popular Node.js BLE (Noble) library.