connecting a raspberry pi to a google home

Question

I want to control my raspberry pi with my Google Home at college, but everything I find involves a server and opening a port which I can not do on my schools network.

Is there another way I can do this?

Answer 1

The Google Home has no way to directly control other devices on the same network or through other wireless protocols. Everything goes through an Internet-based service and expects to communicate with devices via a server-based proxy. How that server communicates with the device is up to the developer.

Depending on your needs and capabilities, you do have a few options.

One option, for example, is to use a tool like ngrok to create a tunnel between the device itself and a service run by ngrok on the public Internet. Calls to the public https address are sent to a service running locally on your device, and you can handle it accordingly.

Another is to have your device connect to a server and listen for command changes, and then execute those changes. If you don't want to run a server, you can even use something like Firebase - have your device listen for changes on the real-time database (which can use the HTTPS port to communicate as a client, so you don't open anything) and have something like a Firebase Cloud Function act as the webhook for your Action.