Sidetracked

Good day all.  I've been away from the keyboard and radios in general in the recent past.  I guess the best term to use would be "Sidetracked".  The weather here has been horrendously cold, and so I had to take the head for my radio out of the car to prevent damage to the display.  I did get on the air last weekend long enough to be net control for the weekly new ham net and to participate in the ARES net that follows the first one.

I'm still patiently working on my local repeater/link system.  My most recent efforts have been to included a control link using FRS radios (Which I have many of).  I'd like to keep all control off the primary channels.  I'd also like to have some sort of combination DTMF control with Voice response system using text to speech synthesis.  So my efforts since my last post have been along the lines of how to add those elements to this project.  I've been doing copious amounts of research on text to speech trying to find something that sounds pretty natural without breaking the bank.  There are lots of very robotic sounding text to speech applications, some of which would run quite handily on a Raspberry Pi.  But I'm aiming for something that is completely understandable without having to do much fiddling with getting the sound I want from the voice.

The beginning of the solution that I've come up with is to use one of my old Android phones (I have two) with a great sounding text to speech dataset already loaded on it, and the write a simple text to speech app that I can connect to via bluetooth and send commands to produce speech from the phone.

The other side of the busy coin is that work has been an absolute zoo for the last couple weeks.  By trade I'm a computer desktop support person.  And we've had some real head scratchers come through the office in the last couple week.  Most recently an HP laptop which needed a hard drive replaced.  The factory restore disks turned out to have a bad driver on them which prevented certain things from taking place on the laptop.  Installs and updates most notably.  After beating my head against this for several days, I found an obscure reference to updating this particular driver along with links to it.  Turned out to be an HP update for the driver in question.  Installed the driver, and boom, things started working.  Prior to that I had tried reinstalling the image 3 times, an in place upgrade once, and full on plain vanilla install once.  The vanilla install actually worked, but the license key on the bottom of the laptop was unreadable, and the one I recovered from the semi-working image wasn't accepted by Microsoft as being valid.

Monday, I spent a morning in a snow drift on a county road just north of the Fayette/Buchannan County line.  Had to wait for the county maintainer to show up with his plow and pull me out.  Then I got stuck again while I was turning around.  That was just plain embarrassing.  I live in Iowa, so snow is inevitable.  I'm not complaining about that at all.  If I didn't want to be here, I'd move to a warmer climate.  Although I think this year that might have to be South America since Florida and Texas are experiencing hard freezes and ice/snow storms.

Enough rambling.  Hope you've had a fun filled couple weeks.  When I get the chance to get back to it, I'll post updates on the repeater.  It won't be this weekend though.  Going to be doing a ham broadband seminar at the public library so that will keep me busy.

 
73
Steve
KDØWSW