Home Automation Recommendations for Linux?

Richard asks: "I am interested in starting some home automation projects. The only requirement is that it needs to be controllable via my Linux based system. A Google search for ' "home automation" linux ' returns more than 35,000 hits, including some good ones like this one, which just show how MUCH is out there. Are there any recommendations for a good controller with a serial or USB connection to the computer? What about power switches and sensors? Do I want a system that sends control signals over my house's power lines or RF? Any good software recommendations? As a first project I thought a simple controllable power switch would be fun: Then I could ssh to my home system, use the power switch to turn on a computer controlled radio (Ten-Tec RX-320) and use Speak Freely to send back the audio to my remote location. (This works now except that I don't want to leave the radio on all the time)."

Comments

Some comments.

[drosselmeyer]

What irks me about Linux home automation is the absence of a good speech synthesiser. I mean, I can automate everything, stick sensors everywhere, make control agents, a microcontroller network, but the endearing thing about it was that my computer /talked/ to me. Festival doesn't quite cut it, not because sound quality is bad (it is quite good) but because making new, custom voices for it is a laborous, time consuming process and no good female voices are available. And doing lip synch with it is something I don't have a fscking idea about how to do. On my old Amiga 500 that was just a matter of drawing some sprites and a hundred of lines of AMOS Basic, no more. I switched to Linux for my home server from OS/2 specifically because I wanted to replace my dying Amiga 500 that was the voice agent for my home automation, and figured that I'd have better chance to find good free speech synthesis for a more modern, free OS. That was, like, almost two years ago. Amiga finally died but I /still/ can't pull anything like this off. What I could assemble from public sources is painfully crude even when compared to the ancient Amiga SoftVoice/Nowspeak. Don't even remind me about rsynth...

Re:Some comments.

[bobbozzo]

OK... If you want lipsynch, you'll need something like they used at DefCon 11 for the CTF contest announcer. Unfortunately, I don't know what it was (google isn't helping this time), and I don't know if it's capable of realtime rendering.

All I know is they used it to pre-record videos of a male newscaster giving announcements. The voice quality was very good, and the graphics were fairly good (facial animation looked like the Half-Life 2 videos I've seen).

Have you seen Ananova? Apparently they're using L&H software (definitely not free, though). I dunno if it can do real-time, either.

Re:Some comments.

[drosselmeyer]

I've seen Ananova. I don't have enough money for the L&H engine. :) Which is what's so annoying about the whole thing - we can't do something I had working perfectly well for no extra penny than what was spent on the machine itself, on an ancient Amiga 500 with measly CPU speeds and no hard disk with our modern machines that outrun and outsmart the poor bitty box many times over. I even thought about emulating it and leaving it like that, but I can't even read the Amiga floppies in PC drives.

So far, my best hopes rest with using the various free implementations of Klatt synthesisers with existing code snippets that do the translation from text to phoneme sets. Unfortunately, the piece in the middle, the code that converts phonemes into Klatt synthesiser input data, is missing and I can't find anything on the net - not even the bit that they used in making rsynth and copied from some book, mangling it throughly in the process.

Re:Some comments.

[Anonymous Coward]

look at Festival ... it's very good...

http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/

Re:Some comments.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Festival doesn't quite cut it...because making new, custom voices for it is a laborous, time consuming process

You probably don't need a complete, general-purpose voice for home automation. Making a limited domain voice seems pretty straightforward.

But to your point about Festival - was there an easy system for making a general-purpose voice on the Amiga? There's a ton of detail in one of those files, extracted from typically pain-staking analysis. I think AT&T has a research system for analyzing hours of recorded speach and using a voice recognition engine to boot-strap the process, but I'm not aware of a system that makes Festival look bad.

BTW, the Festvox demo page has a US female voice.