At 5:30 in the morning I can't be trusted with a phone. I pick it up to check the weather, and twenty minutes later I know a great deal about a stranger's kitchen remodel and nothing about the weather.
So the weather comes to me now. A Raspberry Pi 4 sits on the kitchen counter in a case I 3D-printed to look like a small soundbar. Every 15 minutes it builds one page that answers one question: what do I need to know today? When I press the button on top, say “Hey Jarvis,” or start the coffee maker, Claude turns that page into a short script and the Pi reads it to me while the coffee brews. No screen, no scrolling, no kitchen remodels.
It runs apart from the Pi rack, but it leans on it for what's happening inside the house.
libertybowlPi 4B, 2 GB, microSD, Wi-FiThe rack Pis are named for my teams' home grounds. This one stays in Memphis, a few miles from theforum and thepyramid.
libertybowlKitchen counterMemphis Tigers (NCAA football)
Memphis built it in 1965 to lure the Liberty Bowl game south from Philadelphia, where playing a bowl game outdoors in December had gone about as well as you'd expect. The Tigers have played there ever since. The sign has said Simmons Bank Liberty Stadium since 2022, and as with heinzfield, I'm sticking with the old name. A bowl that fills up with a little of everything once a day seemed like the right name for this job.
One script gathers everything into a single file. The page and the spoken brief both read from that file, so they never disagree.
The page builder is plain Python with no packages to install. ESPN's unofficial API turned away a Python client and happily answered curl, so every fetch goes through curl.
A section that fails to fetch keeps its last good copy and shows how old it is. One bad feed never takes down the page.
Claude writes the words from the same facts the page shows. Piper, a voice that runs on the Pi, reads them out.
The page is only on the home network. It has two tabs: Daily, and a News feed.
| Section | What it shows | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Today | The short list: live games, weather alerts, rain, bad air, and a nudge to put the trash out tonight | Built from everything below |
| Outside | Today's temperature, humidity, rain chance, and air quality, plus sunrise, sunset, and the moon | Open-Meteo, National Weather Service, Home Assistant |
| Calendar | Today's events and the next five, merged from five calendars | iCal links |
| Teams | Scores, next games, how to watch, and team news | ESPN, Google News |
| Tech | Headlines | Hacker News, Techmeme, Ars Technica, The Verge |
| This day in history | One fact | Wikipedia |
| Inside today | Average temperature, humidity, and air quality for each floor since midnight | Home Assistant on cityground |
| Needs attention | Wet leak sensors, low batteries, low printer ink, and any service that's down. Otherwise, “All clear.” | Home Assistant, Uptime Kuma on heinzfield |
| Household | Trash day, recycling day, and this week's birthdays | A config file and the calendar |
| Family photos | Four random scans with the names of the people in them, a new set every 15 minutes | Immich on heinzfield |
| News feed tab | Liberal and conservative headlines on the same topics, side by side. More on that below. | Google News, limited to each side's outlets |
Readings show in the normal text color, yellow, or red, based on limits I set. Air quality uses the EPA's own category words, so “Moderate” means what the EPA means by it.
The photo captions come from the same Immich library as the photo frame. Name someone once and both places know them.
The same story can sound like two different countries depending on who's telling it. So the second tab sorts the day's political headlines by topic, with liberal outlets in one column and conservative outlets in the other.
| Topic | Liberal column | Conservative column |
|---|---|---|
| White House | Two headlines per topic from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MS NOW, NPR, The Guardian, and NBC News | Two headlines per topic from Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Examiner, National Review, The Daily Wire, The Washington Times, and the Daily Caller |
| Economy | ||
| Congress and elections | ||
| Courts | ||
| Immigration | ||
| World | ||
| Health | ||
| Energy and climate |
Each topic is a row, and each row has both columns. Reading across is the point. I see what each side chose to lead with on the economy before I move on to the courts.
For every topic and side, the Pi runs one Google News search. It's limited to that side's seven outlets, to the last 24 hours, and to stories with the topic's words in the headline. The top two make the page, each with the outlet's icon and a link to the article.
The topics, the search words, and which outlet sits in which column all live in one config file. If I decide I've put someone on the wrong side, it's a one-line fix. I expect opinions on this.
The morning brief skips this tab. Sixteen searches' worth of politics before coffee is how a person ends up back in bed. Reading both columns takes a minute and explains a lot of Thanksgiving dinners.
The brief leads with today's weather, calendar, games, and last night's results. Then it stops talking.
Claude writes the morning brief at 4:00 AM and Piper records it, so it's sitting there ready when I come downstairs. It starts almost the moment I ask, and it stays ready until 6:15. That costs about a penny and a half a day.
Later requests are written live. The Pi says “One moment” right away, because a voice has no loading spinner, then plays a soft ping each second and starts speaking as soon as Claude finishes its first sentence.
If a request fails, the Pi plays a clip it recorded at install: “Sorry, I couldn't get your summary. Try again in a few minutes.” A monthly spending limit on the API key means the worst case is that apology, not a bill.
All three send the same request, so there's only one thing to keep working.
| Trigger | How it works | When |
|---|---|---|
| The button | Press to start, press again to stop. It works with wet hands or a full mug. | Any hour |
| “Hey Jarvis” | openWakeWord listens for the phrase, then a second check trained on my voice confirms it was me. | 5 AM to 9 PM |
| The coffee maker | A smart plug measures its power. When the draw passes 500 watts, Home Assistant asks for the brief. | 5 to 7 AM, once a day |
In the first two days it woke up four times while I was talking about something else, twice from another room. Raising the bar would have also blocked the real requests. So I recorded eight “Hey Jarvis” clips and two minutes of ordinary talk, and trained a small check on my own voice. No false wakes since.
With the TV on, it mostly can't hear the phrase at all. I tested it, thought about retraining, and decided to press the button instead. Not every problem needs software.
I was going to start the coffee maker anyway. Idle, it draws under 1 watt. Brewing, about 1,300. The first cup starts the brief and a second cup stays quiet. More on that on the Pi rack page.
With no screen, the LED in the button is the whole display.
| LED | What it means |
|---|---|
| Off | Idle |
| Slow pulse | Getting data or writing the brief |
| Solid | Reading aloud |
| Quick flash | Something went wrong |
Holding the button for 5 seconds shuts the Pi down cleanly. Pulling the plug on a microSD card mid-write is how you end up reflashing it. A press only acts on release, so the long hold never starts a brief first.
The LED runs straight from a GPIO pin at 3.3 volts. I had a transistor and a resistor on the list, and it turned out neither was needed.
| When | Job | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Always | Page server, voice service, button service, and wake phrase listener | Each restarts on its own after a crash or a power cut |
| Every 15 min | Rebuild the page | Fresh data and four new family photos |
| Every 60 s | Uptime Kuma on heinzfield checks the page | An email if libertybowl goes quiet |
| 4:00 AM | Write and record the morning brief | An instant brief until 6:15 AM |
| 5:00 AM | Wake phrase turns on | “Hey Jarvis” works until 9 PM |
| First cup, 5 to 7 AM | Coffee maker starts the brief | The brief plays while the coffee brews |
| 9:00 PM | Wake phrase turns off | A quiet house. The button still works. |
A kitchen gadget that needs a keyboard is a failed kitchen gadget. These are the cases it handles on its own.
That section keeps its last good data and shows its age. The rest of the page carries on.
The page keeps working, and a spoken request gets the apology clip.
I tested this by pulling the plug. The page, the button, the services, the timers, and the wake phrase all came back without help.
There's no nightly backup, on purpose. Everything on the Pi comes back from the code and one install script. The only thing outside the code is one settings file.
| Part | Detail | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 4B | 2 GB, microSD, Wi-Fi | Already in a drawer. Logs live in RAM to spare the card. |
| Cooling | Heatsink case with a fan | The fan turns on at 60°C. After back-to-back briefs with the lid on, the Pi reached 53.5°C, so it mostly rests. |
| Sound | USB sound card, 2 × 5 W speakers | The mics and speakers share one card, and it still hears the phrase over running water. |
| Button | 30 mm arcade, LED | Wired with spade connectors and lever nuts. No soldering. |
| Case | 210 × 98.5 × 52.4 mm | Designed in OpenSCAD, printed in HTPLA. Every part fit on the first print, which has never happened to me before. |
| Software | Python 3, Piper, openWakeWord | Claude writes the words. Everything else runs on the Pi. |
| New parts | $72.79 with tax | The speakers, button, cooling, and wiring. The Pi and power supply were on hand. |