BART Control Skill For Amazon’s Alexa Released

I am pleased to announce that my first ever skill for Amazon Alexa powered devices has gone live in the Amazon Skill Marketplace. My skill, BART Control, accesses live information about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in northern California.

If you’re unfamiliar with Amazon Alexa, it can be described as follows per Amazon:

Alexa, the voice service that powers Echo, provides capabilities, or skills, that enable customers to interact with devices in a more intuitive way using voice. Examples of these skills include the ability to play music, answer general questions, set an alarm or timer and more. Alexa is built in the cloud, so it is always getting smarter. The more customers use Alexa, the more she adapts to speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.

I personally own an Amazon Echo, but there is a wide variety of hardware that is compatible with Amazon’s voice service.

Now let me share some specifics about the skill that I developed and what I used to develop it.

Connect to a Raspberry Pi Zero with a USB Cable and SSH

As some of you may know, I have a hoarding problem. I am hoarding Raspberry Pi microcomputers. In my personal collection I have one from each generation, making four standard units. Well, I recently picked up another unit, but this time a Raspberry Pi Zero. These things are about the size of a nine volt battery, but pack some serious punch. The problem is they are incredibly rare because they retail for only $5.00.

Unlike the standard Raspberry Pi units, these do not have WiFi, ethernet, or standard sized USB ports. This changes things when it comes to connecting. We’re going to take a look at getting set up with one of these Pi Zero IoT devices and be on your way towards some cool hack projects.

Clone A Raspberry Pi SD Card For Quick Storage Upgrades

I recently found myself needing to switch micro SD cards in my Raspberry Pi 3, not necessarily because it needed a storage upgrade, but more because I had a different device that needed the exact memory card that the Raspberry Pi was using. The problem was that I had already done a lot of work on the Raspberry Pi that I didn’t necessarily want to have to do again. This made me wonder. Could I just clone the micro SD card and be good to go? The answer was yes, and it really wasn’t difficult to do.

We’re going to take a look at how to clone or copy a Raspberry Pi memory card to a new one with potentially more space than the previous.

Create A Raspberry Pi Automatic Network Backup Server

I have a few Raspberry Pi units that I’ve picked up over the years. As of now I have a RPi 256MB, RPi 512MB and a RPi2 1024MB unit. I’m currently using the faster model as a RetroPie which I’ll discuss in a future article, but for the older models I have them doing server stuff. For example, I have my 256MB model acting as a network backup server that one of my computers automatically uploads to.

Here we’re going to look at what it takes to get an automated backup server rolling with a Raspberry Pi and how exactly it can be useful to you.

Use Your Raspberry Pi As A Headless System Without A Monitor

I have a few Raspberry Pi computers all doing different things around my home. With the exception of my RetroPie, which I’ll talk about in a different article, they were all configured and running as a headless system. So what exactly is a headless system?

Headless Systems via IoT Agenda:

A headless system is a computer that operates without a monitor, graphical user interface (GUI) or peripheral devices, such as keyboard and mouse.

I use an iMac and my TV has all HDMI ports in use making it a hassle to switch them around. This means I needed to configure and use my Raspberry Pi in a different manner.