hardware

Weird thrift-store find: homebrew CD player

I killed some time this lunchtime in a thrift store. I was half-looking for a case for a kit computer, but wasn’t expecting much to turn up. But I found this:

No identifying marks on this device
Back panel looks hand cut – and is that a PC power supply?
Inside is just â€¦ wow!
Power supply is from EWE Comp in Belgrade, Serbia
DVD decoder/preamp board
looks like a full DVD player output board
surprisingly tidy displays
more of the board
nice simple front panel
surprise inside
hey, free CanCon!
that tray’s a bit flimsy

There really are no identifying marks on this. No idea how it got to be in Canada.

[tÉ’k bÉ’ks] â€” a tiny hardware speech synthesizer/TTS

[tÉ’k bÉ’ks]: inside. The observant amongst you will notice that the speech board is 1/10″ further in than it should be for ideal alignment with the USB serial adapter.

Back in the 1980s, the now-defunct Digital Equipment Corporation (â€œDECâ€) sold a hardware speech synthesizer based on Dennis Klatt’s research at MIT.Â These DECTalk boxes were compact and robust, and â€” despite not having the greatest speech quality â€” gave valuable speech, telephone and reading accessibility to many people. Stephen Hawking’s distinctive voice is from a pre-DEC version of the MIT hardware.

DEC is long gone, and the licensing of DECTalk has wandered off into mostly software. Much to the annoyance of those in earshot, I’ve always enjoyed dabbling in speech synthesis. DECTalk hardware remains expensive, partly because of demand from electronic music producers (its vocoder-like burr is on countless tracks), but also because there are still many people who rely on it for daily life. I couldn’t justify buying a real DECTalk, but I found this: the Parallax Emic 2 Text-to-Speech Module.Â For about $80, this stamp-sized board brings a hardware DECTalk implementation to embedded projects.

The Emic 2 is really marketed to microcontroller hobbyists: Make Your Arduino Speak! sorta thing. But I wanted to make a DECTalk-ish hardware box, with serial input, a speaker, and switchable headphone/line jack.Â [tÉ’k bÉ’ks] (a fair approximation of how I pronounce â€œTalk Boxâ€) is the result.

Parallax Emic 2 Text-to-Speech Module
OSEPP FTDI USB-Serial BreakoutÂ â€” there are many USB-Serial boards that would do this, but two points in this one’s favour are: i) it has header pins for breadboard use, and ii) I had a spare one.
Small 8Î© speaker element â€” the one I used is most likely a headphone element, bought from Active Surplus (RIP). This should be as small as you can get away with (and still hear) as the USB-Serial connection isn’t designed to supply audio power.
Header pins and sockets
Toggle switch
Small project box with perfboard
Jumper wires and solder

Connections

Emic 2             Serial
======             ======
 GND                GND
 5V                 Vcc
 SOUT               RXD
 SIN                TXD

Emic 2             Speaker
======             =======
 SP-                -
 SP+  (via switch)  +

Using it

You’ll need some kind of serial terminal connection. In a pinch, you can use the serial monitor that is in the Arduino development environment. Either way, identify your serial port (/dev/ttyUSBN, COMN:, or /dev/tty-usbserialNNNN) and find a way to send 9600 baud, 8N1 characters to it. Hit Return, and you should be greeted by the Emic 2’s : prompt (or a ?, followed by :). Whether you get the prompt or not depends on whether local echo is set or not. Either way, try sending this line:

SAll watched over by machines of loving grace.

You should hear a voice say the title of Richard Brautigan’s lovely poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (caution: video link contains nekkid hippies). You should get the : prompt back once the the speech has stopped. And that’s all there is to it: send an S, followed by up to 1023 bytes of (basically ASCII) text, followed by a newline, and it will be spoken. There’s more detail, of course, in the Emic 2 documentation and the Emic 2 Epson/Fonix DECTalk 501 User’s Guide for changing voices, etc. Yes, you can make it sing. No, you probably shouldn’t, though.

Notes

The Emic 2 has no serial flow control, so you have to wait until the module stops speaking (or you send it the stop command) before you can send more. The easiest way is to poll the serial port and see if there’s the : prompt waiting. Until you see the prompt, any text you send it may be lost.
The Emic 2 is an embedded device; Unicode is a bit of a stretch. It’s supposed to accept ISO Latin-1 8-bit characters (handy for Spanish mode), though.
Starting every speech line with S may make this board incompatible with assistive technology software such as the JAWS screen reader. I don’t think that this was the goal for Emic 2’s designers (Grand Idea Studio), however.
The output from the audio jack has a fair bit of noise on it, and you need to set the volume quite low to avoid hiss and hum. Your experience may be different, as I may have accidentally made a ground loop. There is a faintlyÂ audible click at the start and end of the text, too.
The Emic 2 uses DECTalk v5 commands and phonemes. Many DECTalk resources on the web (like these songs) use v4 or older, which are subtly incompatible. I haven’t found a reliable conversion protocol yet.

To end, here’s the Emic 2’s â€œDennisâ€ voice reading all of Brautigan’s All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace:

(plain link: molg-dennis-140wpm-16khz.mp3)

(even plainer link if you can’t decode MP2 files: molg-dennis-140wpm.mp3)

(recorded and edited for length with Audacity. No hippies â€” nekkid, or otherwise â€” were harmed in the making of this recording.)

“Well, that was unexpected …”: The Raspberry Pi’s Hardware Random Number Generator

Hey! This is a bit old! Things may have changed and I haven’t necessarily fixed them.

Most computers can’t create true random numbers. They use a formula which makes a very long stream of pseudo-random numbers, but real randomness comes from thermal noise in analogue components. The Raspberry Pi has such a circuit in its SoC, as it helps making the seed data for secure transactions. It was only recently that a driver for this circuit was supplied. ~~To enable it (on Raspbian):~~ I think the module is enabled by default now for the different versions of the SoC.

Make sure your system is up to date with
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt -y upgrade
~~Install the module:~~
~~sudo modprobe bcm2708-rng~~
~~To make sure it’s always loaded, add the following line to /etc/modules (editing as root):~~
~~bcm2708-rng~~
For some RNG-related stuff, install rng-tools:
sudo apt-get install rng-tools

The /dev/hwrng device should now be available, but can only be read by the root user.

Nico pointed out that you also need to:

Edit /etc/default/rng-tools, and remove the # at the start of the line
HRNGDEVICE=/dev/hwrng
Restart rng-tools with
sudo service rng-tools restart

What random looks like

random20130606210642 random20130606210630

Random data look pretty dull. Here are random RGB values made with:

sudo cat /dev/hwrng  | rawtoppm -rgb 256 256 | pnmtopng > random$(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S).png

(you’ll need to install the netpbm toolkit to do this.)

What random sounds like

Two short WAV samples of, well, noise:

Yup, sounds like static. It was made with the rndsound.sh script. You’ll need to install sox to run it.

This is not random

If it sounds like static, and even if it sometimes looks like static, it may not actually be true random noise. An infamous case of a pseudo random number generator being not very random at all was RANDU, which at first glance appeared to produce nearly random results, but close study showed it to be very predictable.

I wrote (what I think to be) a C implementation of RANDU: randu.c. While it produces appropriately random-sounding audio data (randu17.wav), if you output it as an image:

Those stripes are a giveaway; there should be no order in the output. (Then again, I have no idea if I’ve implemented RANDU correctly.) Testing random data is hard, then — you really need a barrage of tests, and even some of them might fail even for truly random output. Thankfully, when you installed rngtools, it included rngtest, a simple checker for random data:

sudo cat /dev/hwrng | rngtest -c 1000
rngtest 2-unofficial-mt.14
Copyright (c) 2004 by Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

rngtest: starting FIPS tests…
rngtest: bits received from input: 20000032
rngtest: FIPS 140-2 successes: 1000
rngtest: FIPS 140-2 failures: 0
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 0
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 0
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 0
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 0
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0
rngtest: input channel speed: (min=67.969; avg=921.967; max=1953125.000)Kibits/s
rngtest: FIPS tests speed: (min=842.881; avg=3208.336; max=6407.890)Kibits/s
rngtest: Program run time: 27658884 microseconds

We were lucky that none of the tests failed for that run; sometimes there are a few failures. RANDU, on the other hand fares very badly:

./randu 17 | rngtest -c 1000
rngtest 2-unofficial-mt.14
Copyright (c) 2004 by Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

rngtest: starting FIPS tests…
rngtest: bits received from input: 20000032
rngtest: FIPS 140-2 successes: 0
rngtest: FIPS 140-2 failures: 1000
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Monobit: 730
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Poker: 1000
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Runs: 289
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Long run: 0
rngtest: FIPS 140-2(2001-10-10) Continuous run: 0
rngtest: input channel speed: (min=45.630; avg=14255.221; max=19073.486)Mibits/s
rngtest: FIPS tests speed: (min=23.694; avg=154.238; max=176.606)Mibits/s
rngtest: Program run time: 141071 microseconds

See? Lots of failures there. It’s hardly random at all. If you really want to get out testing randomness, there are the dieharder tests. They takes ages to run, though.

(Note: newish Intel machines also have a real hardware RNG in the shape of Rdrand.)

I trust you all got the obvious Strictly Ballroom reference in the title?