[arm-allstar] Weather on hamvoip Allstar

[Doug Crompton]

There has been an addition of several TTS and weather related files in an
update tonight. Please use the main menu item 1 to update.

After an Allstar user who is also a pilot questioned me about TTS weather
so he could get aviation weather reports I revisited this. The last time I
had looked at it several years ago I was not terribly happy with the
voicerss TTS. Having revisited it I am impressed with its current
performance. It is also free and allows 350 conversions of up to 100K each
per day with pay plans offering larger sizes. The free level should be way
more than enough for the average user.  A typical 5 day NWS weather report
is about 1200 characters and only changes every few hours or more.

So I improved the tts_audio.sh script which previously had been a package
download but is now part of the main distribution with an update. Please
read the updated TTS howto at hamvoip.org for information. You will need to
go to the voicerss website and get a key if you don't already have one.

The audio_tts.sh script automatically creates an Allstar playable voice
file from any text file. This can be used for ID's, repeater announcements,
weather, etc. It will also do it in about any language.

For weather it is a little more difficult as you need to find the text you
want to play and then format it correctly to say what you want and say it
properly. I have done this in an example script in
/usr/local/sbin/example_scripts/SayWeather.sh

This script must be configured with your NWS zone URL and weather location
and local time zone notation. As it stands it will get my  local data here
in PA. You can run it that way for testing. See the script for
configuration information. It has lots of comments. This script could be
run from a cron every few hours as it will only convert a file if it has
changed since the last download thus not doing unnecessary conversions.
This script works but remember this is an example script. Keep in mind you
will need some basic scripting like this to format the weather before you
send it to tts_audio.sh no matter where you get it.

Have Fun!


*73 Doug*

*WA3DSP*

*http://www.crompton.com/hamradio <http://www.crompton.com/hamradio>*