[Thomas] wrote in to tell us about his latest project, the “AlarmTock”. Like many hacks, this was inspired by some outdated hardware, a radio alarm clock from 1992.
After finally getting fed up with his old alarm clock, [Thomas’] wife purchased him a new one for around $10 from a local retail store. Although most likely an improvement, [Thomas] wondered why after so many years he still had to listen to either an annoying “beep” sound or whatever song the DJ on the radio decided to play.
In true hacker form, he decided to do something about it. [Thomas] crammed a [Chumby Hacker Board], which has much of the same hardware as the [Chumby One] device, into his clock radio. RSS-driven text-to-speech was used to tell him exactly what he wanted to know every morning. A sample .wav file is provided as well as the python script used to execute his morning wakeup routine. For another fun hack from [Thomas] check out his Google treadmill hack here!
Interesting! I used to have that exact wireless card a few years ago. I can’t seem to find it now…
I had to have a fan blowing on it to keep it from overheating, so I hope his version won’t have those issues.
I had the exact same issue with these cards. I tried everything to stop it overheating but it always would.
Glad to see the back of them! :P
I love my Chumby(Insignia Infocast 3.5, to be specific), even though the only thing I use it for is an alarm clock. Never thought about rigging it up as a TTS-RSS reader, though… I’ll have to think on that.
Thanks all, if enough people are interested in adding this functionality to their existing chumby based device I will post the how-to including the preconfiled binaries required to pull it off. Please let me know on the comments section of my page or here.
It’s like an alarm clock Whooooo Whoooot!
I’m really interested in building one of these; I just don’t know where to find RSS feeds like the one he uses…