{"id":244,"date":"2010-09-10T14:51:22","date_gmt":"2010-09-10T20:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/?p=244"},"modified":"2010-09-10T14:51:22","modified_gmt":"2010-09-10T20:51:22","slug":"voice-announcements-via-modem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/?p=244","title":{"rendered":"Voice Announcements via Modem"},"content":{"rendered":"

We have a PBX system through which it’s possible to make announcements, some of which I find myself making regularly.\u00a0 Having an old voice modem lying about, I decided to program it to make regular announcements for me.<\/p>\n

Rather than dedicate a modem to voice announcements, I decided to share a modem that’s also used for HylaFAX<\/a>, on the principle that the less hardware to have to worry about, the better.\u00a0 HylaFAX shares a locking system with minicom<\/a>, meaning that if I use minicom for the voice announcements, I don’t have to worry about who has control of the modem, or of relinquishing control to HylaFAX.<\/p>\n

I located an ancient voice command\u00a0 manual for my US Robotics voice modem<\/a> online.\u00a0 While it took some trial-and-error, I eventually whanged together this script:<\/p>\n

#\/bin\/bash\r\nif [ \"$1\" = \"--help\" ] || [ \"$1\" = \"\" ] || [ \"$2\" = \"\" ]; then\r\necho 1>&2 Usage: $0 [# to dial] [voicefile.rmd]\r\necho --help\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 this message\r\nexit 1\r\nfi\r\nPID=$$\r\ncd \/tmp\r\necho print \"starting\" > \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho send \"ATZ\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"OK\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho send \"AT#CLS=8\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"OK\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho send \"AT#VRN=0\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"OK\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho send \"AT#VRA=0\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"OK\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho send \"AT#VSM=129,8000\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"OK\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho send \"ATS46=255\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"OK\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho send \"AT#VRA=0\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"OK\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho send \"ATDT,$1\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"VCON\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \"sleep 1\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\n# here's the voice part\r\necho send \"AT#VTX\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho expect { >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \\\"CONNECT\\\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho } >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \"sleep 1\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho \"! cp $2 \/dev\/ttyUSB0\" >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\n# end\r\necho >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho sleep 2 >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\necho ! killall minicom >> \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\n\/usr\/bin\/minicom -S \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\ncat \/tmp\/minicom.$PID\r\nrm \/tmp\/minicom.$PID<\/pre>\n
It’s fairly linear — it puts the modem into voice mode, sets a number of parameters, and escapes to the shell to copy a file to the device.\u00a0 What remained is to create a file in a format that the modem could consume.<\/p>\n
Luckily, Ubuntu has a package called mgetty-pvftools<\/a> which contains all the binary files necessary to make it happen.\u00a0 (These files are bundled with vgetty on Gentoo, but vgetty conflicts with HylaFAX, and all I need are the audio conversion binaries.)<\/p>\n
It’s several steps to convert, but this script does it handily:<\/p>\n
#!\/bin\/bash\r\nPID=$$\r\nif [ \"$1\" = \"--help\" ] || [ \"$1\" = \"\" ] || [ \"$2\" = \"\" ]; then\r\necho 1>&2 Usage: $0 [from.mp3] [to.rmd]\r\necho --help\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 this message\r\nexit 1\r\nfi\r\necho \"mp3->wav\"\r\nsox -V --norm $1 -r 8k -c 1 \/tmp\/$PID.wav\r\necho \"wav->pvf\"\r\nwavtopvf \/tmp\/$PID.wav \/tmp\/$PID.pvf\r\necho \"pvf->rmd\"\r\npvftormd US_Robotics 4 \/tmp\/$PID.pvf $2\r\nrm \/tmp\/$PID.wav\r\nrm \/tmp\/$PID.pvf<\/pre>\n
So, all that’s left to do is to set up the first script in an “at” or “cron” job.\u00a0 However, it turns out that minicom requires an interactive terminal to run, so simply running the first script from an “at” job resulted in this error:<\/p>\n
No cursor motion capability (cm)<\/pre>\n
Since the script will run minicom without being attended, a simple way around this is to use the “screen” program to provide an interactive terminal for minicom to use within cron\/at:<\/p>\n
screen -d -m announce.sh 111 announcefile.rmd<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We have a PBX system through which it’s possible to make announcements, some of which I find myself making regularly.\u00a0 Having an old voice modem lying about, I decided to program it to make regular announcements for me. Rather than dedicate a modem to voice announcements, I decided to share \u2026  Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[126,124,125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions\/246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodjobsucking.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}