Welcome to the AlarmPi project.

It's "A Simple Spoken Weather And News Clock" for your Raspberry Pi. Please feel free to take it, and do what you will with it. This project is the culmination of 3 separate projects, an overview can be seen here: https://youtu.be/-Or5jmBqsNE

this project hasn't been updated in a while but still worked as of Jan 2018

And see the details of each of the three parts.

1. Alarm clock https://youtu.be/julETnOLkaU

2. Light https://youtu.be/WpM1aq4B8-A

3. NAS https://youtu.be/T5eKBfstpI0

Setup

required packages:

sudo apt-get install python-feedparser python-dnspython mpg123 festival

optional packages (not all commands will work in all environments):

For Ivona support: sudo pip install pyvona

For pico2wave support (this does not work as of 2016/03/13, but may work in the future -- see below for alternate instructions)

sudo apt-get install libttspico-utils

YOU MUST USE RAMFS to avoid wear on your card and to enable Google Voice.

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/ram
echo "ramfs       /mnt/ram ramfs   nodev,nosuid,nodiratime,size=64M,mode=1777   0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab 
sudo mount -a

If you wish to use Ivona voice from Amazon you must get a beta test account at:

https://www.ivona.com/us/account/speechcloud/creation/

1. Open an account
2. Generate credentials
3. Put accesskey and secretkey in config file

and finally to set your alarm for 733AM Mon-Fri

crontab -e 33 7 * * 1-5 /home/pi/alarmpi/sound_the_alarm.py

Alternate install for pico2wave:

If you need to build it yourself don't worry, it's easy. I thieved most of these instructions from here. But that was written for wheezy and I found that it was a little trickier with jessie. Here we go:

First of all you need to open the file /etc/apt/sources.list and check it contains (the last line should be uncommented) the following lines:

deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi
# Uncomment line below then 'apt-get update' to enable 'apt-get source'
deb-src http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi

Then as it says in the comment, do:

sudo apt-get update

Now, in the alarmpi project we are instructed to make a ramdrive and mount it on /mnt/ram -- I do a lot of my work here because it saves the SD card some wear and tear. This assumes that is already in place -- note that this should be mounted without the noexec option. Modify as you wish.

mkdir -p /mnt/ram/pico_build
cd /mnt/ram/pico_build
apt-get source libttspico-utils
cd svox-1.0+git*

In your favorite editer, modify the file debian/control such that it no longer specifies the automake version. That is change the line that looks like this:

Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9~), automake1.11, autoconf, libtool, help2man, libpopt-dev, hardening-wrapper

So that it looks like this:

Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9~), automake, autoconf, libtool, help2man, libpopt-dev, hardening-wrapper

And save it. Then you can do this:

sudo dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i libttspico-data_*
sudo dpkg -i libttspico0_*
sudo dpkg -i libttspico-utils_*i

That should be it. Note that if you get a permission denied error, your /mnt/ram was mounted with the noexec option set in fstab. Build somewhere else.

You can test your install like this:

pico2wave -w test.wav "it works! "
aplay test.wav

Cheers!

• Thanks again to Michael Kidd for adding the config file and giving this project a real structure.
• Thanks also to Viktor Bjorklund for adding Ivona support.
• Thanks to Craig Pennington for adding pico2wave support and some housekeeping.