How many times have you wished you could have something just speak the time of day? Well with just a more work with Flite, a talking clock is yours.
The Unix/Linux date command provides a near infinite amount of flexibility in providing the date and time. date --help lists all the available options. Here are some handy formatting for date that work well spoken:
date +%T the time in hh:mm:ss format
date +%H:%M the time in hour and minute (24 hour time)
date "+%I:%M %P" the time in hour and minute with AM or PM at the end
date +%D the date in mm/dd/yy format
date "+%A %B %d %Y" the date like Sunday January 23 2016
date "+%A %d %B %Y" the date like Sunday 23 January 2016
So take your favorites and you can add the commands to a shell script or python program like we did in the previous page:
date "+%H:%M %P" | flite (for just a clock)
date "+%H:%M %P %A %d %B %Y" | flite (adds the date)
Clock Accuracy
There are some options. If your Raspberry Pi is connected to the Internet, the operating system (Raspbian) gets the time from the Internet from a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. So you have a good time sync, accurate within a second or two. The Pi does not have a battery backed real-time clock (RTC) to keep time in case it is not connected to the Internet or if it loses power and does not have an Internet connection. Several third-party add-on boards (sometimes called HATS) provide a hardware RTC that will keep very accurate time, sometimes even temperature compensated. Finally, a GPS receiver can not only provide position data, but a GPS connected board can get the atomic accurate time from satellites as well. GPS is not often used for time as it is more expensive and less common.
Add a Button
Reading the time of day in a loop is rather tiring. We need a trigger to read the time when an event happens.
The Fritzing diagram for the button connected to the Pi:
# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2019 Mikey Sklar for Adafruit Industries
#
# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
import time
import os
import board
import digitalio
button = digitalio.DigitalInOut(board.D18)
button.direction = digitalio.Direction.INPUT
button.pull = digitalio.Pull.UP
while True:
if not button.value:
os.system("date '+%I:%M %P' | festival --tts")
# slight pause to debounce
time.sleep(0.2)
We can easily copy this code onto our Pi using the 'wget' command and run it using the following python syntax.
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Learning_System_Guides/master/Speech_Synthesis_on_the_Raspberry_Pi/talking_clock.py sudo python3 ./talking_clock.py
And here it is in action:
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