Speakup and serial adapter cards

Tue Jan 24 23:17:16 EST 2012

Gene and others:
I think we need to separate the problem into two parts, because
the two parts should have different priorities.  The first part,
and the one with the highest priority is to make speakup capable of driving
any serial port connected to the system, regardless of whether it is a serial port
on the mother board such as ttyS0, ttyS1, etc., or on a PCI expantion
board, or on a PCI-E board, or on a USB to serial adapter.

The second part of the problem, and the lower priority part is for
speakup to recognize the serial port that is connected to the
synthasizer automatically without human intervention.  This is lower
priority, because there are various interventions that could be
used to tell speakup which port to use.  Among them, there was once,
and maybe still a boot parameter that can tell speakup which port to use,
and it should also be possible to configure something in initrd
to do it.

D. Curtis Willoughby

P.S.  I am not quite sure what the actual interface between speakup
and the kernel is, but on the surface it would seem that that
interface should be the same regardless of which port is being used.
If this is true, giving speakup the device filename, or maybe
the major and minor device number should be all that it takes
for speakup to drive any port.  The figuring out automatically
which port to use may be much harder.

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> Hello Curt!  This is Gene Collins.  Part of the problem for Speakup is
> that each of the serial synthesizers are managed by a separate driver. 
> They all use the standard irqs and addresses for ttyS0 and ttyS1.  I
> think they even support ttys3 and ttys4.  Since pci serial ports get
> assigned whatever irq and address is available at boot up, Speakup in
> it's current form has no way to know where to look.  I think the same
> situation holds true for usb serial ports.  So the question developers
> need to answer is how to poll the system for the existence of any kind
> of serial port, before polling the list of ports for a synth matching
> the driver.
>
> Just a suggestion for a starting place for developers to look at.
>
> Gene Collins
>
> >This is getting to be a big problem!
> >
> >I have a new computer without a serial port.  To use a hardware
> >synthasizer like a Doubletalk LT I must use a USB to serial
> >adapter or a PCI-E card.  This computer does not have PCI slot(s).
> >If this combination of "cannot do" restrictions is not fixed,
> >serial hardware synthesizers are doomed to become obsolete.
> >
> >I guess there are a few USB synthesizers, and software speach is
> >still well not wonderful.  I have not been able to establish
> >whether the few PCI-E cards can manage IRQs and I/O addresses
> >so they are treated like internal serial ports, but I suspect
> >they cannot.  Is it not possible to modify speakup so that it
> >can use any serial port on the machine, rather than just ttyS0
> >and ttyS1?  Would you developers please look at a solution for
> >this one?  Please!
> >
> >D. Curtis Willoughby
> >
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> >>
> >> Nope, Speakup in now way supports pci serial cards.
> >>
> >> >Hello,
> >> >I know that speakup cannot work with synths connected through a USB to seri
> al 
> >> adapter, however I would like to confirm whether speakup can use serial port
> s p
> >> rovided by a PCI-express or PCI serial adapter card? I am most interested in
>  th
> >> e PCI-Express adapter cards.
> >> >
> >> >Michael Whapples
> >> >_______________________________________________
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