Automated Musings

As most of you know, I do a lot of work within the Free and Open Source communities; so it's natural that my HA setup makes use of this. This post is to briefly outline which majors pieces of software are featured.

CD player - cdcd - for basic CD handling
FM Radio - fm - a small utility to turn the TV card
TV camserv for basic mjpeg streaming
VLC for video streaming
mencoder for capture
MP3 jukebox - Glirnath, but likely to change because the integration in WebFace looks to be painful
Audio mixing - aumix
X10 control - heyu - not truly open source, but close enough


Naturally, these are all controlled and manipulated by the Minerva system, and it's that which makes the magic work.

Additionally, the freely available services of Google calendar, and bleb.org which is used to grab the TV guides.

Yesterday, Karen suggested I upload some screenshots of the current state of my project, Minerva.

Minerva is basically a home automation suite covering everything you would normally do in the home, e.g. switch on lights, set videos, read news, and so on. Minerva does all this! You can email your video, for example.

I should write a better introduction, but I'm busy at the moment :( So these pictures will have to do... p.s. use "view image" to see the detail

An example of the calendar functionality, which hooks in Google calendar.

This is the audio mixer and, being on a web page, can control the volume of all my audio sources from anywhere in the world. (or from my garden :) Note the CD player (3rd panel from top is playing track #2) Also note the 'mixer panel' on the bottom right - this allows you to change the master volume, even when a different window is visible on the left, as it will be when controlling the CD player.

This TV guide is customized for all the house inhabitants. Me, my teddy bear - the usual crowd ;) Every night the TV schedule for the next few days is downloaded, and searched for keywords specific to each person (magic, music, technology, etc), and this guide is built.

This is the "embedded" applet. It allows you to view complete web pages from within the Minerva web interface. This page comes from my Beer Crate podcast (so I don't tread on any copywritten toes). This is a recently feature, and there are several issues to sort out.