Raspberry Pi and astronomy

This time I selected a topic a bit different from usual. After all the blog is about experiments and not only home automation, with RPi...

Since I was a child I've always loved astronomy. I own a small telescope and I took several photos with film cameras, but now I can go a step further thanks to my RPi.

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).

Using whatsapp for home automation - Something real

Last time we saw how to start interpreting whatsapp messages using a simple parser written in Python.

What we did was implementing just a small interaction with our RPi and nothing more. Surely it wasn't a real home automation.

Now it's time to try something closer to that definition. I will keep quite simple, but the concepts are valid for more complex situations too.

Anyway I will just take into account only low-level automation. What I mean is that communication protocols like X10, 1-wire, Modbus, ZigBee and so on will not be used, at least for now.

Maybe in a future I could write a post about these, but do not take this as a fact. It just could happen one day...

Starting up

Let's start from the very beginning... I know that many people already know how to start with a Raspberry Pi, but for beginners this could be somehow difficult.

In this post I will try to explain the various steps to follow in order to have a Raspberry Pi that is usable without problems.

All my future posts will be based on these steps, unless stated differently. Also I use Windows on my computer to perform some of the steps, so if You need to start from a different system You can go here to find more info about starting from Mac OS or Linux.