5 Minute Quick Start

Ambianic is an award winning ambient intelligence project. Ambianic's goal is to provide helpful and actionable suggestions in the context of home and business automation.

Ambianic has two major components: Ambianic UI and Ambianic Edge.

Ambianic UI is pre-deployed and readily available at https://ui.ambianic.ai. If you are familiar with Docker you will be able to install Ambianic Edge in less than 5 minutes. Let's go step by step.

Ambanic Edge

Ambianic Edge is available as a docker image for ARM and x86 architectures so it can be deployed on most modern machines and operating systems.

The reference test system is: Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM and 32GB SD card. Although docker images are available for most common ARM and x86 machines.

To deploy on a Raspberry Pi 4, you will need a recent Raspbian install with Docker and Docker Compose on it. You can install and run the image in the default pi user space on Raspbian.

Installer for Raspberry OS and Debian-like linux

We have a commodity script that will take care of installing and setting up your system. Run this line to setup 

wget -qO - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ambianic/ambianic-quickstart/master/installer.sh | sh

After the setup you can find the installation under /opt/ambianic where you can find the configuration files and the data directory (under /opt/ambianic/data).

Ambianic Pipeline configuration will be under /etc/ambianic.

The Ambianic Edge CLI

The installer will start the service for you. To manage the runtime you can use the ambianic command line. A few example

  • Start, Stop or Restart with ambianic [ start | stop | restart ]
  • View the instance status with ambianic status
  • View logs with ambianic logs
  • Open the UI (if you system has a GUI) with ambianic ui
  • Upgrade the installation with ambianic upgrade

Ambanic UI

Ambianic UI is a modern prorgressive web application (PWA) that provides Plug-and-Play pairing and remote access to an Ambianic Edge device.

Ambianic UI shows a timeline view with important events around your home organized chronologically. Below is an example timeline screenshot.

Timeline

Pairing Ambanic UI with Ambianic Edge

You can easily pair up your Ambianic UI with Ambianic Edge. It works similar to Airdrop.

Make sure to open Ambianic UI on the same local network where Ambianic Edge runs. Ambianic UI will initially display a welcome screen.

Home Screen

If you click on Settings, it will show a pairing page like the one below:

Pairing

After a few moments, pairing will conclude and you will see the unique identifier of your Ambianic Edge device.

Connected

Congratulations! Your Ambianic instance is now up and running!

Configuration

You are now ready to configure Ambianic: pipelines, input sources and AI models.

Read on: Configuring Ambianic Edge.

Once you configure Ambianic Edge and restart the docker image, you should be able to see timeline view like the one above.

The pairing information is persisted on your Ambianic UI client device and you can now access Ambianic Edge from anywhere remotely! The connection is direct and encrypted end-to-end.

Development

If you want to contribute to the code read how to setup a development environment

Troubleshooting

If you experience problems with your initial setup and you can't find a good solution online, feel free to engage the team on Twitter or open a github issue.

Supporting the project

If you find value in this project, consider supporting its future success. See the sustainability section.