Control Almost Any Infrared Device By Voice

TV Photo by Creedi Zhong on Unsplash

Want to control almost any TV, DVD or other infrared device by voice ? If your device is not a newer model that offers voice assistance, you can add voice control by use of a univeral remote like the Broadlink Mini3 IR Control Hub.

These devices operate like your normal wand remotes with two key differences:

  1. Rather than having a directed beam of infrared which you must point at your device, they flood the room with infrared light so they reach all of the devices in the room that are within a reasonable distance and angle from the universal remote.
  2. They are Wifi enabled and respond to commands you issue over your network.

The simplest way of using the universal remote is to simply follow the manufacturer’s instructions and use the mobile software offered by the manufacturer. However, this will involve using the manufacturer’s cloud account which can expose your home network to vulnerabilities.

The more secure but more complicated approach which I have done is to ditch the manufacturer’s mobile app and cloud account and use Home Assistant installed on a Raspberry Pi (model 3 or higher). The steps are too long to list here, but in short, they involve using an IF This Then That (IFTTT) Google Assistant or Alexa applet to issue a command through Home Assistant to trigger a URL call to your Broadlink universal remote using the Home Assistant broadlink plugin. You will also need to setup a DuckDNS account and a secure SSL connection to your Raspberry Pi. The Home Assistant will allow you to setup the broadlink plugin to issue either one command (e.g., to turn the TV on), or several in a series (e.g., turn the TV on and switch to a particular channel).

Below are two YouTube videos explaining most of the steps other than the IFTTT setup (Note that you only need to listen to the first 11 minutes for the first video for the infrared setup, the remainder is not relevant):

To set up voice commands using IFTTT, use the Google Home Assistant applet to cause a voice command “E.g., Turn on TV” to fetch the DuckDNS URL containing your Home Assistant broadlink command.

Lastly do you have a Roku or Roku enabled TV like the TCL Roku series but it’s not voice enabled ? You can ditch the Univeral Remote entirely as well as the Home Assistant setup and just have the IFTTT Google Assistant applet recipe issue the Roku API url command directly to the Roku device’s API. Much simpler and more reliable!

NOTE: The above advice on the Roku is outdated at least for Google’s Home Assistant. With some limitations, Google Home will now automatically detect Roku and setup voice controls, allowing you to turn on and off, switch apps, etc. See How do I use the Google Assistant with my Roku streaming device? on the Roku support pages.

Retro Pie, Mame, and Romsets

Bart Simpson Playing Atari 2600 in Arcade

Retro Pie

I recently installed Retro Pie on an old Zotac Nano I have:
Zotac Nano Computer

What is Retro Pie ? It’s software that allows you to play tons of emulators of old game consoles, from home systems like the Atari 2600, Super NES, Super Nintendo, etc. to the old 70’s and 80’s arcade machines that you would find in the mall. It even has the ability to play emulators for old home computers like Commodore 64 and the Sinclair Z80.

More technically, the Retro Pie is a collection of emulators and scripts which use Emulation Station as a front end.
Retro Pie Arcade Stick Controller

Retro Pie Can Be Installed on Any Debian Based Linux Machine

Here’s a secret: while the Retro Pie is mainly geared to be installed on a Raspberry Pi, you don’t need a Raspberry Pi to install Retro Pie. You can install it on any PC that has a Debian based Linux operating system. Since I had installed Kubuntu on the Zotac Nano, I downloaded and installed the Debian/Ubuntu PC version of Retro Pie.

Downloading Roms for the Retro Pie

After installing Retro Pie according to the instructions, adding some themes (I settled on Cabsnazzy) and a set of Xbox 360 controllers, I downloaded some individual sample Roms to test the Mame emulator, an emulator that plays old arcade type games. What I discovered was that there are several different Mame emulators packaged with Retro Pie. For example, there is “mame4all”, “Mame 2000”, “Mame 2003 Libretto”, “Advance Mame”, etc.

What the Heck Are Romsets?!

Not any Mame rom will play in any Mame emulator. You need to install the correct “Romset version” of the Rom for each emulator. What does that mean ? Well, apparently various people have collected hundreds or even thousands of roms for a particular Mame version, customized them for that particular version of Mame, and packaged them into a “Rom Set”. The Rom Sets for each Mame Emulator are listed here at the Mame Retro Pie Wiki. To find a particular game and what RomSet it is in see here or here to download the entire lists of games for a particular Romset.

Where Are The Mame Romsets ??!!

The first test I did was to download the Rom Set for Mame 2003. This Rom Set is 0.78. The download links are found at archive.org. The non-merged set is the one that will work with Emulation Station.

For the Mame 2003 set (Romset 0.78, about 2 GB) the easiest way to download is in linux using the linux command line program “transmission-cli” which will download torrent files. Copy the TORRENT link shown on the archive.org page and use that with torrent-cli.

A Complicated Download Process for Mame Roms

For example, to download the 0.78 Rom set on your Linux command line type:

Once downloaded, unzip the downloaded file and move your selected roms to the correct subfolder in your Retro Pie install directory i.e., the “RetroPie/roms/mame-libreto/mame2003/” folder. Do NOT unzip any of the Roms. Copy the contents of the “samples” folder, to “RetroPie/roms/mame-libreto/mame2003/samples”.

Watch out for Mame Vector Roms

Note that any vector type games (e.g., Battle Zone, Lunar Lander, Red Barron) should use Advance Mame 3 which is optimized for vector graphics, not Mame 2003 or other Mame emulators where they will look fairly horrible, with the vector lines being blurry and black and white. Battle Zone will show black and white instead of the green that it should like the following screen shot:

Battlezone Screenshot

Advance Mame Romsets – a HUGE Download

For Advance Mame, you will need to download the Mame 0.106 Rom Set as shown on the Retro Pie Wiki.

Warning: The 0.106 Romset is HUGE – about 65.6 GB zipped.

Use 7Zip To Download A Huge Zipped Mame Romset Like The 0.106 Romset

Because of its size, the .106 Romset should be downloaded on Windows rather than Linux as the standard Linux zip programs do not handle multi-part zips well and a program that does, 7Zip only works on Windows.

Extract The Files from The Huge Rom using 7Zip File Manager

Once the .106 Romset is downloaded, download and install 7zip. Open the 7zip File Manager and navigate to the Romset download folder. For version 0.106 you will see that the zip has downloaded in 70 different parts! No worries, 7zip handles these as one zip file without having to actually combine them.

Double click on the “Mame0.106Non-Merged.zip” file:

Screeshot of 7ZIP Showing Mame 106 Files

Double clicking will reveal the contents of the “combined” zip file:

7ZIP Screenshot of Non-Merged Zipped Roms

Double click on that again and you’ll view the roms folder. Double click on the “roms” folder and you will see a list of the roms, most of them are zipped, but some are simply in subfolders:

7Zip Screenshot of Rom Subfolders

While you can extract all of the rom subfolder and zips for all of the games, you can also extract only those individual games that are needed. Just drag the individual subfolders or zip file for a particular game out of the 7Zip File Manage. Do NOT unzip any games roms that are themselves individual zips as they may not work in the emulator if they are unzipped and the Mame emalutor can read the zipped roms fine. For easy transferring to a linux machine, open up a WinSCP session and drop the rom subfolder or zip file into the appropriate folder on your Retro Pie machine (RetroPie/roms/mame-advmame/). As before, the files in “Mame 0.106 Non-Merged\Samples” would be copied over to the related samples folder (RetroPie/roms/mame-advmame/samples).

Unzipped Mame Rom Folders

That’s it – those are the basics of installing the correct romset for a particular Mame version.

Now enjoy some Mame !!

Spacewar Video Demo

most important and influential games in the early history of video games.”

Galaga Video Demo

NOTE: This post is for educational purposes only. The use of roms with the MAME or other video arcade emulators requires compliance with all copyright laws and licenses. Use of most Roms require an appropriate license. Read this FAQ for details.

ShareX Screenshot Tool and Torn Edge Effect

ShareX is a great free and open source screen shot tool that rivals TechSmith’s Snagit. ShareX is packed with features but not very user friendly. I wanted to have screen captures automatically add a “torn edge” effect to a screen shot similar to what Snagit can do easily. It took me awhile to figure out how to achieve the effect, and then some more time to figure out how to automatically apply it after a capture.

Torn Edge Effect

  1. Right click on the tray icon, select “Task Settings”.
  2. On the Task Settings dialog, click “Effects” under “Image”. Check the “Show image effects window after capture”. This will allow you to turn off the effect for a particular image:

  3. Click the “Image effects conafiguration …” button. On the dialog that appears, click “Add”->”Filters”->”Torn Edge”. Set the Depth to 8, Range to 5, Sides to Bottom, Right, and Curved Edges to False:

  4. Click “Add” again, then “Filters”->”Shadow”. Set those settings to Opacity 0.2, Size 10, Darkness 2, Color 165, 154, 154 (grey), and offset 5.0:

  5. If you’d like, experiment with the settings until you get the torn edge look you want.
     

  6. Make sure the Torn Edge and Shadow Boxes are checked, type the name “Torn Edge with Shadow” in the name text box in the top right, and click “Export” to export the settings to backup. Close the dialogs.
  7. Right click on the ShareX tray icon again, click on “After Capture Tasks” and click “Add image effects/watermark” to enable.

Image captures should now automatically result in the torn edge effect. You can follow the above steps to set other effects using the Image Effects Configuration” dialog.

Below is a YouTube video showing the same steps: