Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part I: Home Automation

When one option is a talking computer, is there really

a choice? Figure 4-1 shows the components we will use

to build this project. A script will start every morning,

retrieve weather information from the Internet, convert

it into speech, and then send the audio through remote

speakers in my bedroom.

Project Overview

Obviously, there are a variety of different thermometers

available that will tell you the temperature outside.

However, I don’t want to just stick a thermometer on

the outside of my house—that’s far too boring for me.

Instead, I’m going to make my computer look up the

weather every morning, and read it to me in my bed-

room through some wireless speakers.

This project has four phases, which correspond to each

of the layers in our conceptual design:

• Weather Information

• Speech Interface

• Remote Audio

• Control/Scheduling Mechanism

Figure 4-1. A conceptual design for

translating weather information into

spoken word.

Each of these components is modular, so you can complete them in any

order you like. You can even pick and choose the components you want to

do—for example, if you’re creating a web page and want to show the current

temperature, you can scavenge from the Weather Information phase. If you

want to add speech to a chat room, explore the Speech Interface phase.

Weather Information

There ...