Speakup and serial adapter cards

Tue Jan 24 23:57:14 EST 2012

I think the problem is actually the way some of the synthesizers do speech
indexing etc.
Because they all do it slightly differently, you would almost have to
abstract it some how.
In principal, the basic i/o access shouldn't be to challenging, but the
underlying command structures and control line adjustment etc for each synth
would probably present some challenges to overcome.
It does, however, seem like a fun and challenging project.

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca [mailto:speakup-bounces at braille.uwo.ca]
On Behalf Of D. Curtis Willoughby
Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2012 10:17 PM
To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
Subject: Re: Speakup and serial adapter cards

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
> >> >_______________________________________________
> >> >Speakup mailing list
> >> >Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> >> >http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >>
> >
> >
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