Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Chapter 4, Make Your House Talk

now ready to test out the wireless audio by making a

sound on your computer. Open a terminal and execute

the command:

C:\homehacking\ReadWeather\Say Slashdot rules my

life

Scheduling and Logic

There are many different ways you can tell your com-

puter to read you the weather. The Control Distribution

phase of Chapter 9 shows you how to do it with an

IR remote. If you’d rather use a wall switch or an X10

remote, review Chapter 2—the Perl script can listen for

X10 signals and launch the script on demand.

For this project, I decided to keep things simple and launch the script at a

regular time every day. (My favorite user interface is when the user remains

completely passive.)

1. Install the Firecracker, Perl, and Perl X10 modules

As described in Chapter 12, install the Firecracker wireless X10 interface,

Perl, and the Perl X10 modules.

2. Create the script

You need to turn on your wireless speakers, call your C# application to

retrieve the current temperature, create an English sentence, and send that

sentence to the C# application that synthesizes it into the spoken word.

As with most projects, Perl is my choice for gluing multiple components

together. Type up the following script and save it as C:\homehacking\

SpeakWeather.pl, then download it, along with any updates I’ve made, from

http