Adding other interfaces – ISS tracking and text to speech

It's time to make the dog talk. Or, at least, make BeagleBone Black a little more verbal. Here, we will show you the ingredients to have the board tell us—instead of showing us—when the International Space Station is getting close.

Getting ready

The materials needed are:

• A USB Audio dongle—We will use an inexpensive, low-profile version (http://bit.ly/1KxQatr), though any USB version is fine
• An audio speaker with a mini jack that plugs into the audio dongle
• A USB-powered hub
• A 5V power supply
• An Internet connection, Ethernet or Wi-Fi

Power up your BBB via the 5V supply, open a terminal window on your client box, then SSH into the board.

How to do it…

There are five parts to this recipe:

• Audio setup and testing
• Installing Text to Speech (TTS) and testing
• Python coding to calculate the ISS's current distance from you
• Bash scripting
• Doing a cron job to automatically run all of these

Part I: Audio Setup...