text2cw_bot

Telegram bot which convert text messages to cw

This bot was born from ideas in @cw_qrs chat - https://t.me/cw_qrs - to have another instrument to exercise cw, based on ebook2cw it answers any message you send it with the convertion to cw audio of the message itself.

There's no real magic here as this is mostly a wrapper around excellent program ebook2cw https://fkurz.net/ham/ebook2cw.html by Fabian Kurz DJ1YFK.

It was developped, tested and now lives - as @text2cw_bot https://t.me/text2cw_bot - on a rasperrypi but should run smoothly on any linux platform, please note that the code have been written in the perfect style of "it just works" 0=)

If you want to run your own copy of the bot you have to

• install telegram bot library for python3 (https://python-telegram-bot.org/)

  pip install python-telegram-bot

• install ebook2cw and check binary is /usr/bin/ebook2cw

  sudo apt install ebook2cw

• install QSO (part of morse package) and check binary is /usr/bin/QSO

  sudo apt install morse

• install python3-xhtml2pdf and UbuntuMono font and check /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ubuntu/UbuntuMono-R.ttf exists

  sudo apt install python3-xhtml2pdf fonts-ubuntu

• install feedparser python library

  sudo apt install python3-feedparser

• ask botfather to create the bot token as usual
• start the bot with

  text2cw_bot.py -s 0 placeyourtokenhere

  and test it via telegram

If everything is ok and you want to start it at boot you can copy text2cw_bot.service in /etc/systemd/system and put your bot token in there then start it with

systemctl start text2cw_bot

test it again via telegram and eventually check it status

systemctl status text2cw_bot

Once you feel ready enable it

systemctl enable text2cw_bot