For some time, the Raspberry Pi 4 also supports booting via USB to circumvent buggy SD card system media. Back in May, this feature was supplied as beta, since September it is considered as stable functionality.

Booting Raspberry Pi OS (former Raspbian) via USB works out of the box, but additional steps are required …

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In the last part of this series, we enabled the voice assistant to read temperature sensors and checking the weather over the internet. In this article, we will ensure entainment by implementing a DIY internet radio and an API for bad jokes.

Radio streams under Linux

A commonly used function of commercial voice …

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There are plenty of radiators and fans for the small single-board computer - but how big is the impact of using cooling? Don't get me wrong - having a cooling system is always better than having no cooling at all. But I was curious about the exact difference with the current top model (RPi 4B, 4 GB).

First of all it is …

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In the last part of this series we linked Rhasspy and Node-RED to teach the assistant its first function: reading the current date and time. In this part we will focus on measuring temperature via the internet and DIY temperature guards based on ESP32 and MQTT.

DIY temperature guard

Temperature sensors are cheap and …

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In the last part of this series we checked-out and installed software for building our own voice assistant without leverage cloud resources. In this article we will focus on linking both Rhasspy and Node-RED. At the end, the assistant will learn it's first function.

Desired state

As we already know from the last …

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Voice assistants are omnipresent gadgets loved by technophile geeks. They support ad-hoc tasks (set tee timer, announce outdoor temperature) and integrate flawlessly into home automation and other third-party systems. Unfortunately, data privacy is often subordinated with these kind of gadgetry. Using various …
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To translate text into voice, a TTS software (Text-to-Speech) is required. Under Linux there are basically two free tools: CMU Flite and eSpeak.

CMU Flite (festival-lite) exists since 2001 and is therefore considered a veteran in speech synthesis under Linux, eSpeak was first released in 2006. From a sound perspective, …

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Winter time is crafting time! I spent the last couple of days on the Raspberry Pi and PIR sensors (Passive Infrared). Using this sensors it is possible to recognize motions - in combination with GPIO APIs you can create useful applications.

The first idea that came in my mind was to monitor my washing machine in the …

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CRUX-ARM is a Linux distro for ARM devices like the Raspberry Pi that follows the KISS philosophy. If you're looking for a minimalistic system you might want to have a look at the construction kit.

I'm using CRUX-ARM on one of my Raspberry Pi's. The installation fits on a 1 GB memory card. On the project's wiki there …

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There is no standard sensor that can be used with lm_sensors to get the temperature of the Raspberry Pi embedded board - what a pity! Fortunately for this function there is a dedicated command called vcgencmd which is already included in the Raspbian image. To make it work you will need to customize the LD library …
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