Category Archives: Link of the Day

CSpeak and Cantarino

Yesterday’s surfing churned a couple of interesting links on the subject of speech synthesis and computer singing. I wasn’t really explicitly looking for this stuff, and can’t reconstruct what led me here, but I thought I’d archive this here. The first is a link to a formant based speech synthesizer in just 150 lines of code. The quality is, well, not amazing, but the code is simple enough to follow, and enabled me to gain a grasp of formant synthesis, at least, with a little explanation from Tom.

CSpeak – David A Roberts.

They have a video too!

Apparently this is derived from Cantarino, a project to do speech synthesis on the Arduino. It can sing too, and a bit better to my ear.

Cantarino — Speech synthesis on the Arduino

Arduino sings ‘Daisy Bell’ from Tinker on Vimeo.

Both of these synthesizers have difficulty doing consonants in an intelligible way, but it is fascinating that such a simple technique can approach legible speech at all. Bookmarked for future tinkering.

The Cinnamon Bear

When I was young, I used to tune into KEX 1190 in Portland during the Christmas season when they would play episodes of “The Cinnamon Bear”, a classic 1937 radio serial about Judy and Jimmy and their quest to catch the Crazy Quilt Dragon who has stolen the Silver Star on the top of their tree and return before Santa arrives on Christmas. There are 26 episodes, which were played one per night starting on November 29th, and culminating on Christmas Eve.

If you like, you can get the episodes from my Cinnamon Bear page or from radiolovers.com. Enjoy!

The Wobbulator

The Wobbulator is a pretty nifty little video modification gadget. Basically, the idea is that by adding a couple of extra magnetic yokes at odd angles to the conventional yokes on a black and white display tube and driving them with a frequency synthesizer, you can create all kinds of amazing patterns. The results are very cool. It seems to me that a software simulation (while somewhat less cool) could still be a fun and interesting project.

Bookmarked for later consumption:

Blair Neal – Visualist

Hydropower generator

On hack-a-day today, I saw this interesting link to a small hydroelectric generator. I’ve been interested in DIY/non-centralized generation of electricity for quite a while (without actually developing any serious knowledge about it, mind you) so I found the idea rather interesting. Paul taps water from a stream and uses it to feed a 2 inch water pipe, which eventually gets split into four 1/2 outlets which spray water onto a turbine which drives a low-rpm alternator.

Hydropower generator – Hack a Day.

The hack-a-day article did make one claim which made me pause though: it said it could generate 56VDC at 10A. Really? That’s 560 watts, which seemed a lot. In watching the video, it shows that it can generate 56V (actually AC), but that is without any load. As soon as a load (such as a charge controller) is placed on the circuit the voltage will drop. I’ll work out the math a bit at lunch, but I’d be surprised if you could get much over 100 watts of power. Still, not inconsiderable, and if I had a shack in the woods, it would be a great way to keep the place lit.

It’s also interesting to figure out what the reliability of such a system can be. The turbine is constructed from PVC elbows, and it’s not clear to me how they would handle the stress in continuous duty.

Still, very cool.

Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font

I admit it: I’m an old timer. When I first was learning about Unix and C programming, I was sitting in front of a TVI 912 terminal (if I was lucky) or an ADM-3A (if I wasn’t lucky) that was connected to a VAX-750. I’m not overly nostalgic, but I do continue to work in much the same way, except with lots of terminals open on a much larger screen, usually with a decent fixed-width font. As a throw back to these older times, I often use green text on a dead black background.

A few months ago, I found a truly nifty font that enhances my sense of nostalgia. It’s a very cool True Type font, which is carefully designed to match the old VT220 font, complete with the “scanline” appearance that I remember. It’s actually a pretty nice legible font as well. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it.

Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font.

The Hila Trebuchet

I like trebuchets. Former Pixarian and RenderMan engineer Dan apparently located some plans for building small trebuchets from the Hila Science Camp:

The Hila Trebuchet.

And here’s a short YouTube video showing him test firing four of them. Cool!

Bonus video (unrelated to the above): Dan also posted a link to this video, showing video shot from an RC airplane while people on the ground tried to shoot at it with fireworks:

Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font

I’m mostly resistant to nostalgia when it comes to computing. Let’s face it, the iPhone has way more impressive capabilities than the desktop machines I was using just a few years ago. But occasionally I do want to take a step back and revisit those heady days of yesteryear, when I would sit in a half cube in front of a TVI912 or an ADM3a and write programs for the VAX 11/750 we had at Oregon.

When I feel that way, I fire up an old PDP-10 simulator that I have, and try to remember what it was like to run TOPS-10 on the DEC 1091 that we had at the University of Oregon. And it just doesn’t seem right to be typing on a modern terminal: you short of want that crude look of those ancient terminals with the glowing green phosphor. Luckily, you can get a font which emulates that look. Check out:

Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font

Build Your Own Z80 Computer

Old timers may remember Byte magazine, and Steve Ciarcia’s column therein. Steve went on to publish Circuit Cellar magazine, an electronics magazine which is more or less dedicated to embedded computer systems. Byte books published a book of his called “Build Your Own Z80 Computer”, which now can be downloaded in its entirety with Steve’s Permission from scribd or Google Books.

Why would anyone want this book? After all, the Z80 is pretty primitive compared to even microcontroller chips like the Atmel ATMega series or PICs. For me, it’s a return to my computing roots; a chance to do something that I couldn’t do back then. Z80 parts are still available and inexpensive, and you can still learn a lot about computers by tacking one of these things together.

Build Your Own Z80 Computer.

Z80pack – Z80 Emulator and Crossassembler for UNIX

More “don’t ask” links. I was tinkering with emulators again, and ran across this comprehensive page on the Z80 and the various DRI operating systems that ran on it. Nice emulators and lots of software and archived information.

Z80pack – Z80 Emulator and Crossassembler for UNIX

Addendum: The Z80/CPM were CPU/Operating systems back in the days before PCs, just in case you are too young to know. Back then, using a computer looked something like this:

And yes, the IMSAI 8080 had an 8080 inside it, not a Z80.