EVA: What’s On Telly For The Visually Impaired

[chewabledrapery] has certainly used his Raspberry Pi for good. His girlfriend’s grandfather is growing more visually impaired as time goes on. He likes to watch telly, but has trouble reading the on-screen information about the channel and programming. To that end, [chewabledrapery] has built an electronic voice assistant called EVA, who fetches the telly schedule from a web service and reads it aloud in her lovely voice that comes courtesy of Google Translate’s TTS function.

Under EVA’s hood is a Raspberry Pi. A USB hub powers the Pi and holds a small USB soundcard, a Wi-Fi dongle, and a USB daughterboard that the controller plugs into. The daughterboard is from a USB keyboard, which makes another appearance in the awesome controller. It’s made of a joystick and two arcade buttons that use the USB keyboard’s controller to interact with Python scripts.

[chewabledrapery]’s scripts make formatted requests to a web service called atlas, which returns JSON objects with the TV schedule and content descriptions. EVA then turns to Google Translate, speaking the formatted text through a small amplifier and salvaged PC speaker. In order to minimize the number of web calls, some of EVA’s frequent musings are stored locally. A full tour of EVA is after the break.

We love to see hacks that help people. Remember this RFID audio book reader?

7 thoughts on “EVA: What’s On Telly For The Visually Impaired

  1. A far out, useful project for those who could benefit from it. I recall that Caleb Craft directed us to an utility that helps map out the keys of a keyboard, but I no longer recall what it was called. Not sure it would have been particularly use here or not One never knows what videos YouTube is going to recommend on what key word, YouTube, as it did with Eva here.

  2. Check out public radio wherever you live, and online. The pictures are better on radio. They are your own. I gave up on TV almost 20 years ago. The last greatest hope, Babylon 5. TV is mostly about giving you AADHD. The first A is for acquired. Editors… Boosh!

    1. Hey, yes I agree personally I don’t have an aerial plugged into my TV at home I just stream the odd boxset, documentary or movie. I have considered adding some radio stations to the schedule list, I believe Atlas aggregates this data, thank-you for you comments!

    1. Hi,

      Ha ha thanks, no not yet, if I get around to it I might document my in-car headless media player that I based on a Cubietruck board. It was going to be based on an RPi but I found it was a bit sluggish running Logitech Media Server and it didn’t have built in wifi and sata (which I wanted), watch this space :)

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