Chocolate Box – Overview

The Chocolate Box project is made of many different parts, which are summarised by this diagram:

Human Interaction

The interaction happens though Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant. In my case, any of the many Echo devices in my house can pick up the request and activate the whole flow.

Infrastructure / Logic

This part connects the signal coming from Alexa to the actuator device inside the box. The hardware for this part is a Raspberry Pi 3, and it’s powered by Node-Red for the automation system and Mosquitto as MQTT Broker.

Actuator

The actuator device is based on Arduino MKR1000, and two servos. All embedded into a cardboard box, disquised as a Christmas present.

In the upcoming posts of this series I’ll break down in details every block, and all the configs will be made available too.

Stay tuned!