Happy New Year! May the open source be with you!

The Christmas tree is among the most popular symbols of the holiday season. Decorating it is always fun, especially for a maker. In 2019, before the launch of this campaign, we sent one of the first stable prototypes of ANAVI Miracle Controller as a small gift to Andrey Kozhevnikov a.k.a. CODeRUS. He is a talented software engineer, a very skilled maker, and a leading contributor to some of our other open source projects. Andrey used ANAVI Miracle Controller and addressable (digital) LED strips to decorate his Christmas tree and to control it with voice commands through Google Assistant and Home Assistant.

Home Assistant is a popular open source platform for home automation. With the default firmware, available on GitHub as an Arduino sketch, ANAVI Miracle Controller works out of the box with Home Assistant through the machine-to-machine protocol MQTT. Google Assistant is an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that recognizes speech and voice commands. Andrey shared a short video in twitter with the amazing result!

Andrey is well known in the open source communities because of his numerous contributions over the years to Qt, Maemo, MeeGo, and Sailfish OS. These names ring a bell for any die-hard open source fan interested in smartphones, most notably Nokia models like N900 (Maemo) and N9 (MeeGo Harmattan) made a decade ago.

First Stretch Goal Met

In the meantime, the crowdfunding campaign of ANAVI Miracle Controller is enjoying success. It was fully funded a few minutes after the launch, and shortly after that the first stretch goal was met. We will add awesome stickers for all contributors, including stickers of KiCad, the awesome free and open source software used to design our printed circuit board.

Thanks,
Leon