Talking Clock
Posted: Sat 08 Oct 2011, 07:27
NEW VERSION 1.3.1
Latest SneekyLinux as kindly donated his voice for the clock, it was recorded at 44100 Hz 16bit so I have converted it to two sizes,
44000Hz 8bit and 8000 Hz 8bit to keep the file size to an acceptable amount.
I can barely tell the difference in the two files, then my HiFi is telephone quality these day's.
Well I have updated to version 1.3.1, this has a tidier looking GUI with hotkey's for all the function's, there is no wav files included with the package,
a voice package can be downloaded separately, I will say that this runs fine on my PC using Lucid 5.2.8, it should run on any puppy as it only relies on clock data and aplay,
if you already are using any of the other versions that being 1.1 or 1.2 then they will need to be completely removed to use this as the file structure is configured differently.
If for any reason the cron job gets removed, you will have to create a new one using "say_clock_time" as the command to be executed.
The next version I may add a button to add a new cron job, I also need to create some more voice's,
it's easy enough to do just need to emulate the wav file's stored in /root/.talking_clock/data/ and name them accordingly.
Anyway let me know if you find a problem, I'm sure it should be fine though.
![Image](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26024684/linux/puppy_linux_files/saytime-1.3.1.jpg)
I'll leave the version 1.1.
==============================================================================================================================================
I've been looking for talking clock and came across a few bash scripts that will do the job, also found some wav files that
I have edited and re-sampled into 8bit files, it doesn't sound to bad though the script could do with some work, as on the hour is say's the 0:0
I would prefer it to say just the hour with either AM or PM, I'll have to do some reading on script writing, anyway it may be of interest to some.
maybe some would like to make a puppy app with it, it is small less than 200k extracted.
Geoffrey
Edit:
I've put together a package for the taking clock using wav files, it is 204k installed, during the install it amends to /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root, so that it runs on the hour,
a small GUI is installed also, this can be found in the menu under system, look for " Say Time Config ", from this small GUI you can set different sound effects and preview them,
also selecting " Setup " will open Pschedule to allow the changing of the clock event timing, this is basic scripting nothing fancy, tried to keep it as simple as possible.
It will speak the time in the AM/PM format, at 12AM it will say " TWELVE MIDNIGHT " and at 12PM say " TWELVE NOON ", depending on the speed of the computer the effects may not work
as they should as they rely on running multiple instances of aplay to get the echo effect, I have not tried this on another PC, works fine on mine but saying that it is a
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ Core 0: 2310 1: 2310 MHz with 3gigs of ram.
Should it be uninstalled, manually delete the Pschedule entry from within Pschedule as if it is installed again it will amend another copy to /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root.
I think I've covered everything that's needed to be known, let me know how it runs, I'm not planing on doing anymore to it, it seems to work well enough as it is, well it
suit's my purposes, maybe someone would like to make some voice packs.
Edit: I tried this with Slacko 53, had a problem it locked up the PC resulting in a Ctrl+Alt+Back and xwin to get going again,
this happened when the config was run from the menu, I edited the config script so now it works.
Latest SneekyLinux as kindly donated his voice for the clock, it was recorded at 44100 Hz 16bit so I have converted it to two sizes,
44000Hz 8bit and 8000 Hz 8bit to keep the file size to an acceptable amount.
I can barely tell the difference in the two files, then my HiFi is telephone quality these day's.
Well I have updated to version 1.3.1, this has a tidier looking GUI with hotkey's for all the function's, there is no wav files included with the package,
a voice package can be downloaded separately, I will say that this runs fine on my PC using Lucid 5.2.8, it should run on any puppy as it only relies on clock data and aplay,
if you already are using any of the other versions that being 1.1 or 1.2 then they will need to be completely removed to use this as the file structure is configured differently.
If for any reason the cron job gets removed, you will have to create a new one using "say_clock_time" as the command to be executed.
The next version I may add a button to add a new cron job, I also need to create some more voice's,
it's easy enough to do just need to emulate the wav file's stored in /root/.talking_clock/data/ and name them accordingly.
Anyway let me know if you find a problem, I'm sure it should be fine though.
![Image](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/26024684/linux/puppy_linux_files/saytime-1.3.1.jpg)
I'll leave the version 1.1.
==============================================================================================================================================
I've been looking for talking clock and came across a few bash scripts that will do the job, also found some wav files that
I have edited and re-sampled into 8bit files, it doesn't sound to bad though the script could do with some work, as on the hour is say's the 0:0
I would prefer it to say just the hour with either AM or PM, I'll have to do some reading on script writing, anyway it may be of interest to some.
maybe some would like to make a puppy app with it, it is small less than 200k extracted.
Geoffrey
Edit:
I've put together a package for the taking clock using wav files, it is 204k installed, during the install it amends to /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root, so that it runs on the hour,
a small GUI is installed also, this can be found in the menu under system, look for " Say Time Config ", from this small GUI you can set different sound effects and preview them,
also selecting " Setup " will open Pschedule to allow the changing of the clock event timing, this is basic scripting nothing fancy, tried to keep it as simple as possible.
It will speak the time in the AM/PM format, at 12AM it will say " TWELVE MIDNIGHT " and at 12PM say " TWELVE NOON ", depending on the speed of the computer the effects may not work
as they should as they rely on running multiple instances of aplay to get the echo effect, I have not tried this on another PC, works fine on mine but saying that it is a
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ Core 0: 2310 1: 2310 MHz with 3gigs of ram.
Should it be uninstalled, manually delete the Pschedule entry from within Pschedule as if it is installed again it will amend another copy to /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root.
I think I've covered everything that's needed to be known, let me know how it runs, I'm not planing on doing anymore to it, it seems to work well enough as it is, well it
suit's my purposes, maybe someone would like to make some voice packs.
Edit: I tried this with Slacko 53, had a problem it locked up the PC resulting in a Ctrl+Alt+Back and xwin to get going again,
this happened when the config was run from the menu, I edited the config script so now it works.