wjam / piclock

A radio alarm clock on a Raspberry Pi

##Notes on initial setup of the Raspberry Pi##

##Layout of the application##

###Radio script### Responsible for playing music from an internet stream

• Use gstreamer to play an external URL
• Use DBus to listen for messages
  • Listen for message to shutdown (Unix way would be to have a PID file)
  • Listen for messages to change volume
  • Listen for messages to change channel (?)
  • http://cgit.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus-python/tree/examples/example-client.py
  • http://cgit.freedesktop.org/dbus/dbus-python/tree/examples/example-service.py
• Is this script a daemon or does it kill itself when the radio is not playing?

###Alarm script### Responsible for kicking off the radio script. This is what the cron script will call.

###Alarm management script### Responsible for maintaining the crontab which will kick start the alarm script.

• Run via cron, probably run multiple times a day (once an hour?)
• Connects to Google Calendar to retrieve changes to the alarm clock events.
  • https://developers.google.com/google-apps/calendar/
• Adds new alarm clock events for the next x weeks.
  • Will need to record what date the application is up to
    • Where will this information be stored? GConf? /etc?
• Calendar event should have radio station on it

###LCD script### Responsible for managing the LCD screen and also the buttons around the LCD.

• http://www.adafruit.com/products/1110
• Should the management of the buttons be in this script or a separate one?
• Adafruit custom code or LCDproc?
  • Does Adafruit support LCDproc? (probably not for that product)
• Regularly updates LCD - possibly have to update the time as well?
• Listens to button presses, through i2c, and emits DBus messages to the radio
• 6 buttons available:
  • Switch radio on/off
  • Volume up
  • Volume down
  • Channel up
  • Channel down
  • ???

###Web front end###

• Manages list of radio stations to URLs
• Handles the Google authentication
• Alter Calendar details(?)
• Probably not written in Java 8 due to memory/speed issues
• Python/Bootstrap/AnuglarJS application which minimises what the Pi actually needs to serve
  • http://flask.pocoo.org/
  • http://mattrichardson.com/Raspberry-Pi-Flask/
  • http://flaskpi.com/

##Tools required##

• Soldering Iron
• Solder sucker

sudo pip install --upgrade google-api-python-client
sudo pip install --upgrade python-gflags
sudo pip install --upgrade python-crontab