I am delighted with my current home alarm clock setup.
I have the Morefine M8S N100 Alder Lake PC running Fedora Workstation KDE Spin. It is cabled into an OLED television set. I use the remote on the TV: settings > energy saving > panel > turn the panel completely off.
The Morefine M8S stands out in that crowd of machines for having active cooling, but running quiet. At the moment, they are on sale with 12 GB RAM and a 128 GB NVME drive for $170.
A full kit Raspberry Pi isn’t that much less, doesn’t have full size HDMI, isn’t running Intel hardware (super Linux compatible) and they do have that nasty problem of writing /var/log to the SD card, burning it out. The newer Pi can do an NVME drive, but that’s going to drive the cost up close to the M8S. But I digress.
The tuner part of the TV stays on all the time. The M8S is cabled to the TV via an HDMI cable. Although the OLED panel is off, the tuner keeps the HDMI port active, so the M8S doesn’t disconnect or try to rejigger the display when the panel is turned off for sleep mode.
Previously, to connect to the sound bar, I used Bluetooth, bypassing the TV. This was not great. Specifically, Bluetooth wants to disconnect if not streaming, and Linux doesn’t want to play with an audio source that isn’t there. Sure, there are kludgy ways to get it to light up for a sound, but this is clearly paddling upstream for drudgery and debt.
But I saw the Toslink optical S/PDIF connector on the sound bar, and the lightbulb went on. Feed everything in to the TV over HDMI, and feed the audio from the TV to the sound bar over Toslink. We’re back to fun and profit. Well, fun, at least.
This is working out great.
The M8S is a Nextcloud client, so it has access to my audio files directory, and via the web, the Music app player.
KAlarm on the M8S runs VideoLAN Client (VLC) headless, pointing at the audio file (or for waking up, a .pls playlist file). I have seven .pls files for seven days of the week.
I also happen to have my source files for iPhone ringtones in Nextcloud, so when I want a short alarm sound, I’ve got a passel of those available.
KAlarm lets me set schedules for every Sunday of the month. I happen to need a different schedule for the second Sunday, where the first, third, fourth, and fifth are a normal schedule.
What is super nice is that I can have Nextcloud playing music at a low volume, but when VLC kicks in, it plays at the normal volume. They don’t interrupt each other, they simply multiplex.
Lastly, I’ve been playing with Coqui TTS (text-to-speech), so sometimes the sound being played by KAlarm is a feminine Scottish voice saying “Do daily inventory”. 🙂
Next, I want to generate Westminster Chimes sound files, and have it play those on the hour. It would be fun to generate the sound file on-the-fly, starting with the announcement chime and then Coqui TTS saying “Seven” or “Noon” or “Thirteen hundred”.
A future project I have in mind is to write a Perl script to pull down my calendar out of Nextcloud, and then write entries into the KAlarm file for special events.
Also, I wouldn’t mind turning the M8S (and my other machines) into Snapcast clients.
Fun indeed.