When my first son was born, we needed a white noise machine to put him to sleep because he was very sensitive to sound. For some odd reason, I didn't want to spend the money on an off-the-shelf product. It was also during the early days of the COVID lockdown, so a DIY idea came to me 💡 why not putting my old Raspberry Pi v1, a speaker, and an AUX cable to work and build one myself?
After a few days of tinkering, Sleepi was created and my first son was sleeping soundingly under the soothing(?) sound of a microwave oven 😂.
I'd like to share the code and setup instructions with fellow (new)dads who want to make the baby bonding time a bit more fun.
WARNING!!! The python code is very janky, not something I will show off, but it is working code created with very reasonable effort.
- Raspberry Pi x 1 (though I am using the original Raspberry Pi, newer ones will probably work better)
- a speaker
- an AUX cable
You are familiar with Raspberry Pi, Linux, and Python.
You need a couple of packages
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install mplayer supervisor
You need python3, whether it's a system wide python3 package or a version of python3 managed by a python version manager such as pyenv.
- Check out the code to a directory in your Raspberry Pi (e.g. /home/pi/Projects)
cd ~/Projects
git clone git@github.com:DaHoopster/sleepi.git
Or download the project zip file from github
cd ~/Projects
wget https://github.com/DaHoopster/sleepi/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
unzip main.zip
mv sleepi-main sleepi
- Set up Python virtual env and pull down the dependencies
cd ~/Projects/sleepi
python -m venv ~/.virtualenv/sleepi
source ~/.virtualenv/sleepi/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
- Copy the mp3 files
mkdir ~/Documents/sleepi
cp ./media/*.mp3 ~/Documents/sleepi
- Copy the
supervisorconf for Sleepi to the system supervisor config dir
sudo cp sleepi_supervisor.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/
- Reload supervisor
sudo supervisorctl reload
- You should be able to point your browser(desktop or mobile) to
http://<IP_OR_DOMAIN_NAME_OF_YOUR_PI>:5000and see the web UI. - Each mp3 file is 30 minutes in length. By default, the web UI will play each mp3 file twice which gives you an hour of soothing sleep-inducing sound. If you press the big red stop sign button, the sound will stop.