DecTalk External (decext) testers wanted!

[Gregory Nowak]

Okash and list,
I have one good news, and two bad news. I'll start with the good news
first. Again, I have a bns connected to ttyS0, and it works! I tested
only for about five minutes or so, but reading the full screen, screen
review, changing volume, pitch, and rate all work as expected. 

Now for the first bad news. I have a usb to serial converter which
uses the belkin_sa module, and shows up as ttyUSB0. The machine I'm
testing on has two on board serial ports ttyS0, and ttyS1. It has no
other modems, or serial boards. I connected my bns to the usb to
serial converter. I first assumed that since the machine has two
serial ports, the usb to serial converter would be passed as
ser=2. When I did that I got no speech from the bns. I saw in dmesg
that the speakup_bns module loaded, and the last line was "synth
probe." I then thought that maybe 0-3 was reserved for standard serial
ports, and I tried passing ser=4 to the speakup_bns module. I don't
know what dmesg shows or doesn't show, because my system locks up
about 30 seconds after I load the module, forcing me to do a
reset. Doing dmesg >dmesg during that 30 second window results in an
empty file called dmesg once I boot back up.

This begs two questions. First, does ser=x where x is an integer still
hold for usb to serial converters? Second, on a machine with two on
board standard serial ports ttyS0 and ttyS1, assuming ser=x still
holds true, would a usb to serial converter be ser=3 after the two
standard ports, or ser=4 as the first non-standard port, or something
else?

It's worth noting the results of a couple of tests I think. With the
speakup_bns modules *not* loaded, at the shell prompt, I do:
echo "hello" >/dev/ttyS0
with the bns connected to ttyS0, and the bns says "hello" as
expected. If I connect the bns to the usb to serial converter, and do:
echo "hello" >/dev/ttyUSB0
at all possible baud rates on the bns from 150 to 38400, I get garbage
from the bns. Unfortunately, setserial doesn't seem to know how to
talk to the usb to serial converter uart, so I can't use it to change
baud rates on the pc side. If I then use minicom with the bns
connected to the usb to serial converter, and type hello in minicom, I
do hear the bns speak "h e l l o" as I type it in minicom. I also use
this usb to serial converter with brltty to drive an alva340 braille
display with no problems.

The second bad news is that I also tested with the speakup_dtlk
module, and got no speech. The dmesg output is:

"[   15.198916] speakup_dtlk: module is from the staging directory, the
quality is unknown, you have been warned.
[   15.201084] synth probe
[   15.201092] Probing for DoubleTalk.
[   15.201098] DoubleTalk PC: not found
[   15.201102] dtlk: device probe failed"

My dtlk is on the default 29e-29f i/o ports. The modinfo output is:

"filename:
/lib/modules/4.10.9/kernel/drivers/staging/speakup/speakup_dtlk.ko
version:        2.10
license:        GPL
description:    Speakup support for DoubleTalk PC synthesizers
author:         David Borowski
author:         Kirk Reiser <kirk at braille.uwo.ca>
srcversion:     DAC7EC81AED58DF124C47E0
depends:        speakup
staging:        Y
vermagic:       4.10.9 SMP mod_unload modversions 686
parm:           port:Set the port for the synthesizer (override
probing). (int)
parm:           start:Start the synthesizer once it is
loaded. (short)"

Thanks.

Greg


On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 09:46:32AM +0100, Okash Khawaja wrote:
> Greg,
> 
> I've updated speakup2.tgz so that it contains bns migration also:
> https://github.com/bytefire/speakup-decext/raw/master/speakup2.tgz
> 
> Replace speakup directory under drivers/staging/ with the updated one
> and run this from root of kernel source tree: make
> M=drivers/staging/speakup clean && make M=drivers/staging/speakup
> 
> I still need to update the patches I sent.
> 
> Okash


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