Jul 04

Announcing Current Weather Conditions

Home Audio/Video, Home Automation No Comments »

Last year I promised to post the scripts used to obtain and announce the current and forecasted weather conditions over our home speakers. We have a couple of key fobs in various locations of the house that can be used to trigger announcing of the current and forecasted weather conditions. Those key fobs use RF signals to trigger X-10 commands which are then used to execute the script below. The Cepstral Text to Speech (TTS) utility is used to announce the current conditions and forecast over our home speakers. Here’s an example of an announcement.icon

Read more to see the Perl script.
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Jul 04

Broadcasting Severe Weather Alerts Through Home Speakers

Home Audio/Video, Home Automation, Home Monitoring 4 Comments »

Last year I hacked away at some scripts to report on current weather conditions and to announce caller ID information through our home ceiling speakers.  I had also hacked away at an initial script to poll the US National Weather Service for severe weather alerts associated with our area.
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Although the severe weather alert script seemed to be reliable, my family – including the dog – weren’t too pleased about hearing an emergency buzzer and alert broadcast every few minutes while a severe weather alert was in effect. To keep the family and dog in harmony, I did some more hacking to:

  • Announce the weather alert twice and then be quiet for a period of time
  • Override the quiet period when a more severe alert occurs

I’ve also published the current source code for people to leverage.
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Mar 26

Announcing Caller ID Over Home Speakers

Home Automation, Home Server 1 Comment »

As a follow-on to our implementation of text to speech (TTS) announcements of weather conditions and alerts over our home ceiling speakers, we thought it would be useful to feed caller ID name from our home phone line into the TTS system. My mobile phone has a similar feature where it verbally announces known callers. It was surprising to me, but the feature on my mobile is pretty useful: when I am busy and I get a call from a known caller, I can make a decision to pick up without needing to touch the phone.

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Aug 30

Home Systems Monitoring Components

Home Automation, Home Monitoring 9 Comments »

I corrupted a work colleague by sharing a link to our home monitoring data. Since he wants to set up similar monitoring at his home and I had already capitalized on information and tools available on the Web, it made sense to give back to the community by publishing a brief introduction to the components that make up the initial version of our home monitoring system.

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