Smart-Google: Control your custom devices with Google Home using Python and Flask

How to integrate Google Home to your custom devices by Google action and Python with Flask Framework

If you are looking for a way to control your custom devices with Google Home, you might be interested in Smart-Google, a project that allows you to create your own Google actions and connect them to your devices using Python and Flask. In this blog post, I will show you how to set up the environment, create a simple Google action, and use MQTT to communicate with your device.

Environment

To run this project, you will need the following:

A Google account and a Google Home device
A custom device that can connect to the internet and use MQTT protocol (I used a ESP 8266 board with micropython firmware)
A Heroku or Google Cloud or AWS or any other cloud platform which supports Python apps
A Firebase account and the Firebase CLI installed
Python 3.8 or higher and pip installed

Installation

The first step is to clone the Smart-Google repository from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/DaTiC0/smart-google.git
cd Smart-Google

Next, you need to create a virtual environment and install the required packages:

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, you need to export some environment variables that will be used by the application. You can either set them manually or use a .env file. The variables are:

SECRET_KEY
SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI
MQTT_BROKER_URL
MQTT_USERNAME
MQTT_PASSWORD
API_KEY
AGENT_USER_ID
SERVICE_ACCOUNT_FILE
FIREBASE_ADMINSDK_FILE
DATABASEURL
PROJECT_ID
PRIVATE_KEY_ID
PRIVATE_KEY
CLIENT_EMAIL
CLIENT_X509_CERT_URL

Google Service Account

To use Google actions and Firebase, you need to create a service account and download a JSON file service_account_file.json that contains some credentials.

extract from this file 'PROJECT_ID' 'PRIVATE_KEY_ID' 'PRIVATE_KEY' 'CLIENT_EMAIL' 'CLIENT_X509_CERT_URL' and export to environment or save in .env file for security generate_service_account_file.py file will genearate service account

TESTING

To test the application locally, you can use ngrok to expose your Flask server to the internet, or you can use the cloudfare tunneling service.

To use ngrok, you need to download the ngrok executable and run it:

./ngrok http 5000

To use the cloudfare tunneling service, you need to install the cloudfare tunneling client and run it:

cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:5000