Hacking

Submitted a patch to fix a couple of cursor movement bugs in pyCFontz, an LCD control library that's part of the mpy3 package, another car MP3 player. It was accepted and integrated very quickly by the maintainer, which was a pleasant surprise. ALICE uses the API from this project for LCD display control also, so it benefits both applications.

Concurrently, I've been making lots of small fixes, and adding final polish to ALICE. Now that the architecture's stable, I've been making the code more readable, breaking out some redundant bits and pieces of code into functions, adding a few more events to each of the core speech and LCD display modules, and still finding the occasional bug :-) The whole app is starting to feel like it's very together, which is a gratifying sensation after 6 months of work.

I do hope that users will enjoy the voice controlled MP3 module that comes with ALICE, and developers will find the available modules easy to work with, and useful for creating voice controlled apps. Potential applications are limitless, but could include things as diverse as a system monitor (disk space, CPU use, memory, users, etc) , an X-10 appliance controller, a voice datebook/calendar, a news and info reader, a data acquisition monitor (with customized voice alarms), a GPS navigation system, and so on...

--- Rupert