February 4, 2019

Raspberry Pi Alarm Clock Update #4 - Internet Radio and Open-Source!

School has been kind on homework, so I have had time to make some HUGE advancements in the project.

Firstly, I have setup the PiClock switcher script with a day and night theme.
Night Theme (Above) and Day Theme (Below). They are green and blue respectively
Also, it has now replaced my Google Home Mini as my alarm clock. It has been setup for a few days and has worked well except for the alarms being strangely quiet, but still audible. I attempted a fix but it kept crashing. Despite this, I did notice that it keeps alarms between reboots, which is handy.  

Just this weekend I setup the coolest and most time-consuming feature, internet radio. I have currently setup one radio station which plays when you say 'start action 1', which when used with routines, can be changed to something like 'custom radio', which is what I use. 
It is currently setup to play until it hears the hotword again. It requires a custom action in the Actions Console and code on the Pi (instructions: https://bit.ly/2WGXp0p ) for when it receives the command, which then executes the VLC library (python-vlc) which plays the stream. It could also be utilised to play local music files, but I have not tested and implemented this. I hope to set it up in the future to play until I send it the stop command, even after queries, but I ran out of time and concentration and it kept crashing. It will only take another weekend. 😉

Finally, I have setup a GitHub repository which I will upload my code and more detailed instructions to for this project. It can be accessed here: https://github.com/hasmar04/PiAlarmClock

If you have any feedback, questions or answers to my problems, please leave a comment.

Check out all the posts for this project here.


February 3, 2019

Crankshaft Technology Update #1 - Classes have begun!

Today was the first lesson for the term, and was a huge success. The class ran smoothly and was very productive, with a maze being created and working by the end.

If you are interested in signing up and are located in or near Moggill, Queensland, Australia, check out the website at coding.crankshafttech.com and fill out the form on the Contact Us page.

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