Installing Pico TTS

Sooner or later you may wish to hear your Raspberry Pi speaking.

It's nice to get messages from your RPi by Whatsapp, or reading on a small display (or TV), but hearing this device answering you with a real voice could be amazing!

There are several TTS (Text To Speech) engines avaliable for a Raspberry Pi and you can find a list here.

Usually offline engines suffer from low quality voices (and sometimes limited languages avaliable). On the opposite side, online TTS engines could have really high speech quality, but you need an internet connection (and your recorded voice will be analyzed from someone else).

Sending pictures with Yowsup

One feature that could be quite useful in home automation is the ability to send pictures took with a webcam to our smartphone.

This could happen on request, by just asking to take a photo with our parser, or automatically when the script is programmed to do that (at specified intervals or maybe when detecting movements).

3D printer remote control

Let's keep Whatsapp aside for a while... This time I will offer you a short post about a useful Raspberry Pi application if you own a 3D printer.

3D printers are becoming more and more affordable. Still high in price, but today you can buy them for less than €600. They are not really easy to use, but they can be quite useful in many situations. Also for creating cases for your RPi!

Checking devices connected to the LAN

One thing that could be useful is checking if a device is connected to your LAN at home.

This is a quite simple task and could be used for several goals, from sending you a Whatsapp greeting message when you arrive at home to inform you in case of undesired connection to your own wi-fi network.