Driver for Echo Speech Synthesizers

[Martin McCormick]

	I am going to attempt to write a driver or actually a
pair of similar drivers for the Street Electronics external
speech synthesizers.  For those who haven't ever used them, they
are low-end synthesizers that were sold around 20 years ago.  I
have one that will turn 20 this year and a somewhat newer Echo
model that superceeded the first one and has a few pros and cons
over the older model.

	I looked at the driver modules in the speakup source tree
and decided to look at the BNS module.  I have a question and may
have a few more before this is all over.  Does the Braille and
speak use the Control-E as the escape character for its speech
control commands?  The Echos also use that character, but mainly
I am asking so I better understand what I am looking at in the
source.

	I am sure that the commands to change pitch and volume
are different, but they did look kind of similar to those of the
Echo.

	Anyway, I think the fun is going to be in trying to make
the Echo which has an extremely simple command structure get
along with everything else.  I was impressed at how small the
drivers are and I hope I can do as well as Kirk and others do
when I have a go at trying to make the Echo work.  I have one at
work in addition to the two that I actually own, so there is an
incentive to make this work.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group