Adding a new synth to Speakup

Adding a new synth to Speakup

[Garrett Klein]

Hello Kirk and all,

	Do to the generosity of one of my teachers, I have access to an echo at least for a little while since my DoubleTalk LT might be off to England or wherever to be repared. I want to add a driver for it based on either the BNS or ltlk drivers, as it displays some characteristics of both. For example, both the echo and bns use control-e as their command character, but the echo has 100 different pitch settings like the DoubleTalk LT.

	My questions are:

1. besides changing the appropriate .c file (either speakup_bns.c or speakup_ltlk.c), what do I need to do to put the new driver into the list of synths to compile into the kernel?
2. Is there any way to slow down how much text is sent at a time besides lowering the baud rate? The reason I ask is because the echo will often say part of something and then pause for five seconds before finishing, most often with colons, dashes, or periods involved. Needless to say, this is very annoying.
3. Would it be possible to lower the priority of speakup's speech? BC I had mplayer playing some stuff over nfs (no, bandwidth wasn't the problem) and it would stop whenever the echo would speak. I'm not talking about being in mplayer, oh no, I was in irssi and just one message would often be enough to interrupt mplayer despite the fact that it was running on another console.
4. Would anyone care, or use the driver, or would me investing the time and effort merely be an exercise for me?

	Okay I have a few more questions... is the synth-specific code totally separate from the common speakup code, as in there are no statements like if (synth == xyz);
/*do something one way*/
ETC. Also, where are the minimum and maximum limits for things like pitch defined? I'd think in the synthesizer-specific files, but I didn't find anything obvious. Thanks for your time.

Garrett

Re: Adding a new synth to Speakup

[Kirk Reiser]

Garrett Klein <kleins@iquest.net> writes:

> 	My questions are:
> 
> 1. besides changing the appropriate .c file (either speakup_bns.c or speakup_ltlk.c), what do I need to do to put the new driver into the list of synths to compile into the kernel?
You also need to put entries for new synths in the Kconfig file so the
make system can present the new synth as an option at compile time.

> 2. Is there any way to slow down how much text is sent at a time besides lowering the baud rate? The reason I ask is because the echo will often say part of something and then pause for five seconds before finishing, most often with colons, dashes, or periods involved. Needless to say, this is very annoying.

The synth has to do the data flow control by telling speakup when it's
buffers are full via handshake signals with either hardware or
software handshaking.

> 3. Would it be possible to lower the priority of speakup's speech? BC I had mplayer playing some stuff over nfs (no, bandwidth wasn't the problem) and it would stop whenever the echo would speak. I'm not talking about being in mplayer, oh no, I was in irssi and just one message would often be enough to interrupt mplayer despite the fact that it was running on another console.

That is a kernel process priority setting which determines whether
other processes are interruptable or not.

> 4. Would anyone care, or use the driver, or would me investing the time and effort merely be an exercise for me?

I suspect it would be an exercise because the Echo has not been built
for many years since the 80's I believe.

> 
> 	Okay I have a few more questions... is the synth-specific code totally separate from the common speakup code, as in there are no statements like if (synth == xyz);
> /*do something one way*/
> ETC. Also, where are the minimum and maximum limits for things like pitch defined? I'd think in the synthesizer-specific files, but I didn't find anything obvious. Thanks for your time.
At the bottom of each synth specific file such as speakup_ltlk.c are
> the arrays for parameters and function pointers and the like.

  Kirk

-- 

Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
e-mail: kirk@braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
phone: (519) 661-3061

Re: Adding a new synth to Speakup

[Willem van der Walt]

Hi,
The echo GP was popular here in South Africa.
I still have one.  I think, when faced with the need for a hardware synth,
  like when one need to fix a broken file system,
  a driver for the Echo would be useful.


On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, Kirk Reiser wrote:

> Garrett Klein <kleins@iquest.net> writes:
>
>> 	My questions are:
>>
>> 1. besides changing the appropriate .c file (either speakup_bns.c or speakup_ltlk.c), what do I need to do to put the new driver into the list of synths to compile into the kernel?
> You also need to put entries for new synths in the Kconfig file so the
> make system can present the new synth as an option at compile time.
>
>> 2. Is there any way to slow down how much text is sent at a time besides lowering the baud rate? The reason I ask is because the echo will often say part of something and then pause for five seconds before finishing, most often with colons, dashes, or periods involved. Needless to say, this is very annoying.
>
> The synth has to do the data flow control by telling speakup when it's
> buffers are full via handshake signals with either hardware or
> software handshaking.
>
>> 3. Would it be possible to lower the priority of speakup's speech? BC I had mplayer playing some stuff over nfs (no, bandwidth wasn't the problem) and it would stop whenever the echo would speak. I'm not talking about being in mplayer, oh no, I was in irssi and just one message would often be enough to interrupt mplayer despite the fact that it was running on another console.
>
> That is a kernel process priority setting which determines whether
> other processes are interruptable or not.
>
>> 4. Would anyone care, or use the driver, or would me investing the time and effort merely be an exercise for me?
>
> I suspect it would be an exercise because the Echo has not been built
> for many years since the 80's I believe.
>
>>
>> 	Okay I have a few more questions... is the synth-specific code totally separate from the common speakup code, as in there are no statements like if (synth == xyz);
>> /*do something one way*/
>> ETC. Also, where are the minimum and maximum limits for things like pitch defined? I'd think in the synthesizer-specific files, but I didn't find anything obvious. Thanks for your time.
> At the bottom of each synth specific file such as speakup_ltlk.c are
>> the arrays for parameters and function pointers and the like.
>
>  Kirk
>
> -- 
>
> Kirk Reiser				The Computer Braille Facility
> e-mail: kirk@braille.uwo.ca		University of Western Ontario
> phone: (519) 661-3061
>
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup@braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
>

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