I finally got Gruebox 2 (the grue-phone based on the rotary chest phone) assembled and sorta working. It’s put together, but I’ve redone the solder joints between the handset and the speaker and mic jacks several times, and they’re still really noisy and temperamental. I will likely have to pull it apart again for some […]
This is the first demo of the phone more-of-less complete. Â You can see a video over at my facebook page. Â Apologies for those who don’t use facebook, but the raw video is too big for wordpress to handle. After the demo, I decided that it was time to tear the phone apart and try interfacing […]
Thanks to an impedance matching transformer from Radio Shack, I can now play audio though the handset. Yay! It still needs to be a little more polished, but the basic concept works. it_speaks.mov
Here is a mostly complete list of offline text-to-speech engines I have at my disposal.  I have cleaned up the text somewhat from the last time, so they should be easier to understand.  Let me know what your favorite is in the comments. Espeak is a very robotic, but relatively lightweight engine: Festival is a quirky, […]
I’ve got two competing TTS (text-to-speech) engines right now, espeak and festival. Â Each will require some tweaking, but here is a very short game fed through each. Festival: Espeak: Let me know what you think in the comments
This post is long overdue. Â The hardware has been complete (enough) for weeks now, and the software has been improving incrementally. Â It is the impending arrival of the Maker Faire that finally prodded me enough to finish writing this up. Â I’ll be there showing this off. Â Here’s what the completed project (mostly) looks like: Â (more […]
In order to interface the modem with the telephone, I bought a simple device called a tele-coupler. Â It is used when only have a phone that doesn’t have a standard jack, or is a digital phone line. Â It actually straps to a telephone handset and accoustically couples the phone and modem together… wonderfully old-school, […]
What I hope will be the final piece of the puzzle arrived today. Â It’s a little adapter that turns a regular modem into an acoustically-coupled modem. Â It’s intended for use when there isn’t a regular phone line available—you can strap this to a regular handset instead. I decided to do a proof on concept, just […]
The key to making this project work is allowing it to communicate with the old TDD. Â To do that, I’ve managed to acquire a couple of TDD modems, specifically designed to talk to TDDs. Â The Intellimodem can even do Baudot, which the TDD does (at 45.5 baud[*]). More after the break