Timer accessory for Raspberry Pi?

sleep 300 ; beep -n 10

-Gordon

No no, he asked for settable minutes, so "sleep 5m; beep -n10" ;)

Oh, I see that beep is not built-in but it's in the repo, see "apt-cache show beep"

That's not a desk accessory, but it might do if beep worked. Trying the example command beep -f 1000 -n -f 2000 -n -f 1500 produces no sound on a Pi3b+ with speakers on, able to play youtube audio.

Any working solutions appreciated!

bob prohaska

On Thu, 9 May 2019 02:31:27 +0000 (UTC), bob prohaska declaimed the following:

No experience but...

md_admin@microdiversity:~$ apt-cache search timer alarm-clock-applet - alarm clock panel indicator gnome-clocks - Simple GNOME app with stopwatch, timer, and world clock support kalarm - alarm message, command and email scheduler ktimer - countdown timer wmclockmon - Displays a clock in 12/24h mode with alarm mode

md_admin@microdiversity:~$ apt-cache search alarm remind - sophisticated calendar and alarm program xcal - a graphical calendar with memos and reminder alarms xfce4-timer-plugin - timer plugin for Xfce panel

Check google or other documentation sources for information on what each of those packages actually does...

Installs and works, but, like beep, is silent.

Installs, but I can't figure out how to start it.

Looks like the big problem will be getting audio output.

Thanks for writing!

bob prohaska

There's a hat for that.

Various from simple mono to full blown hifi DAC

The Pi has audio already, the problem is finding software to use it. Chromium can do it, one would think there's a library somewhere that "normal" audio functions can access.

Anybody got a hint?

Thanks!

bob prohaska

Pi doesnt have a speaker or transducer so you need to add one, and not all models have the 3.5mm jack either.

Den 2019-05-11 kl. 03:24, skrev bob prohaska:

alsamixer or alsa-info?

It may be that 'beep' is another (muted) input to alsa ?

you may want to install the pulse audio volume control:

pavucontrol

or us it if already there - there is an option to enable system sounds in the playback panel.

Gordon

The pulse audio volume control desk accessory is present, with the alsa mixer as the default. I tried running pulseaudio explicitly on the command line, but that just interfered with the sound already working in Chromium. When I killed the added instance of pulseaudio all sound stopped, so it looks as if I'll have to reboot and hope it comes back.

AIUI, Pi audio is via the VC4 gpu, so it's a different piece of physical hardware than is found on typical desktop computers. For a long time chromium browser had faulty sound, but now it seems to work well. Firefox still has some trouble.

Probably I should have mentioned that I'm using the experimental GL desktop; performance with youtube is otherwise too slow to be useful. Apologies for not mentioning that earlier!

Thanks for reading and any further ideas.

bob prohaska

I believe this is mistaken. There's an audio device settings dialog under the Pi menu, which reports that bcm2835 ALSA (Alsa mixer) is the default. Pulseaudio is present, but evidently independent. It isn't mentioned in the audio device settings, as if it's unrecognized. Is it useful, or even possible, to substitute pulseaudio for alsa?

Thanks again for reading and any further ideas. bob prohaska

I think alsa is the way to go on Linux, I only ever had problems with pulseaudio. Simon Long put it in because (apparently) it works together with the bluetooth gui settings :rolleyes: but I think it broke all sorts of other things. To get my mpd player setup to work I do 'sudo apt-get purge pulse*' (and, somewhat unrelated, disable bluetooth in config.txt with 'dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt').

If your Pi can play sound files, you can record a suitable alarm noise and have your timer script trigger a lightweight (command line) player to play it through alsa.

My Pi isn't running and I'm feeling too lazy to go and fire it up, but this Fedora system provides 'paplay' as part of the pulseaudio-utils package which does the trick: the command "paplay Diablada.flac" immediately plays that FLAC encoded file.

This pulseaudio-utils is also available for Raspbian - and may well be installed by default.

A further thought: has Supercollider -

- use it in place of a command-line audio player (which might be severe overkill)

OR

- use it to generate your alarm audio clip.

Either way it looks like a fun thing to play with.

On Sat, 11 May 2019 16:03:47 +0200

On x86, beep rattles the PC speaker directly, through the /dev filesystem, bypassing *all* the Linux audio APIs. That's really what it was designed for. You can redirect it to other devices (which is presumably why it's in Rasbian at all; it could be useful with GPIO), but without some serious jiggery-pokery you're not going to get it to use ALSA or Pulse at all.

Honestly, I'd just replace beep with a sample played through aplay, mplayer, or something. Not as elegant, but *way* simpler.

FWIW, Xfce plugins are plugins to the Xfce panel; you just right click on the panel you want the plugin to appear on, and add it. Then you get an "icon" on the panel, if you right click that you can change properties / settings for a plugin.

If you are running a different desktop environment than Xfce, you probable don't run the xfce panel either and thus Xfce plugins won't help you.