[raspberry-vi] More progress
- From: Mike Ray <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: raspberry-vi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2014 11:20:02 +0100
Hello,
On Wednesday evening I released the Arch image to Rill for testing.
She identified that the keyboard was very unresponsive in the console
and some letters appeared twice, some not at all and even logging in was
difficult because it was difficult to type 'raspberry' coherently. This
matches what some people reported with the previous release, on which
the audio was still pretty broken.
Last night I identified what the issue was with this and we went some,
possibly all the way to fixing it...
In speech-dispatcher there is a setting in the espeak.conf file which
controls settings for the espeak tts module. A couple of the settings
were set too high for the Pi to cope. Particularly the
EspeakAudioQueueMaxSize was set to 441000. This settings controls the
amount of space set aside as a que of processed audio for playing by sd.
With a sample size of 16 bits and a sample rate of 22050 this is a very
high number. It is ok to expect even a modest desktop or laptop machine
to cope with this but not the Pi.
In the sd espeak module source I could see that the playback thread was
blocking while waiting either for audio to be created or while waiting
for queue space to be filled. This blocking operation makes the
keyboard unresponsive.
Rill and I tried reducing these numbers. Rill was particularly
determined to reduce the numbers until she broke it :)
Anyway I think we now have it configured to make the keyboard useable.
It occasionally misses a beat if one types very fast but even faster
machines occasionally do this.
So later today I will put the image up on the site, after checking with
Mo that he has completed the web site upgrade and let people loose to
test it. When I do post it I will post here again and summarise what it
contains and how to give it a try.
Note I have been a little delayed this week by finally breaking three
separate SD cards. This is because in efforts to get this stuff to work
my SD cards are in and out like a fiddlers elbow. I am currently down
to one SD card and waiting for some more to arrive from Ebay.
Mike
--
Michael A. Ray
Analyst/Programmer
Witley, Surrey, South-east UK
The box said: 'install Windows XP, 7 or better'. So I installed Linux
Interested in accessibility on the Raspberry Pi?
Visit: http://www.raspberryvi.org/
From where you can join our mailing list for visually-impaired Pi hackers
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