[Update] My plans for 2019

It has (again, yeah I know) been a while since my last blog post. The new year has already been here for almost a month and I even didn’t wish you all of the best for 2019. So for anyone that feels offended by that;

All the best for the new year !

2019 will be a good year (we all say that at the beginning), however let me first talk a bit about last year. A bit of an annual review…

What have been done the last year, or let’s say the last ~7 months of 2018 as I started all over half of June.

• Complete website overhaul 
• Started the “[DiY] Home (Personal AI)” blog series, with currently 9 parts. (Based on Raspbian)
• Started the “[DEV] MycroftOS – A bare minimal OS based on Buildroot” blog series and development.
• Learned a lot about A.I. , smart speakers and home automation.
• Refreshed my Buildroot and Linux / cross-compiling knowledge.

All in all quite satisfied with the progress I made, although the last few weeks of 2018 and the first few weeks of 2019 where rather busy with the daytime job. Development stalled a bit because of that…

2019

So onto the plans I have for the upcoming year !!!

MycroftOS

First of all, I would like to “finish” a first “stable” version of MycroftOS. I put finish in between brackets because I know, it will most likely never be finished. Development of Buildroot, the Linux kernel, the Mycroft A.I. software stack or any other package for that matter is going at a rapid pace, so to be able to keep up, development will never be truly finished.

Secondly, stable is also in between brackets, because I know that when more and more users are using the OS, the more rare cases of use will pop up with all their relative rare bug reports. Again, it will never be finished and we will keep working on it. However, pushing something that is called version 1 and is out of the alpha,beta and Release Candidate version scheme will be the aim.

I just released a second alpha version yesterday, however more on that in a next and dedicated blog post.

[DIY] Home (Personal A.I.) Assistant

This is basically very much related to finishing MycroftOS as I decided not to push forward with the Raspbian way of creating my own [DIY] Home (Personal A.I.) Assistant. I want my project to act as an end consumer device, with a minimum on overhead. In my opinion MycroftOS based on Buildroot is the way to go. I hope, but let’s see if I am right later on tis year 😉

[HACK] Installing HassOS on the Athom – Homey

Not much is planned for the moment for this project. The device is rather expensive, so really need to wait this finance is allowing the extra spent of money. However all knowledge that I am gaining with the MycroftOS project can be used one-on-one for this project. A new hardware revision has just been released by the guys from Athom, so perhaps in the near future, some second hand devices will pop up onto the market. We will see what 2019 brings in this regard.

Home Assistant

I would like to spend a bit more time, money and resources on Home Assistant. My initial plan was to include HASS onto the same device, however as Mycroft need all the resources it can get, I believe the better way to go is to keep HASS installed at a separate system. I currently have Home Assistant installen on a small Intel Atom server, however nothing is configured yet ! So would like to start with adding some Zigbee devices and smart lighting. And of course in time connect HASS to Mycroft and vica versa. I have some ideas to implement presence detection on HASS and have Mycroft great me when I get back home. HASS can keep track of all events which happened during my absence and Mycroft could inform me about the stuff I missed while I was away. Have some other nice ideas, but nothing concrete as of yet.

That was about it for now. Plan do change often, so as soon as my personal roadmap changes dramatically I will report back. Happy coding and developing!

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