With all of my software projects I’ve been working on lately, I decided about a month ago to get into some hardware hacking as well. Arduino seemed like the obvious choice due to its fast growing popularity, great support, and the fantastic starter kit. I ordered up the starter kit and over the past month, worked through the 15 sample projects to learn the ins and outs. After completing these, I decided a binary clock would be a cool first self led project.

“I recently ran across this post explaining how to hack your GoPro camera over wifi and thought it would be awesome to control my GoPro with my Amazon Echo. I imagined being able to set up a home security system that I could control with the power of my own voice. Sadly, GoPro’s “API”, which is really more of a hacked http request, only works when directly connected to the camera via wifi.

Get ready for a long, nerdy post with lots of coding and even more configuration. Don’t worry, I did it in a few nights, so anyone can. Pretty much every night, my wife asks, is the Nest still on? It’s freezing in here. Due to our setup, and hopefully not sedentary lifestyle, the downstairs Nest often things we aren’t home when we’re on the couch, and goes into a balmy 55 degree away mode.