TTS Clock is a program for the empeg will speak out loud the weekday, month, day, and time using prerecorded files a few seconds after ignition. Click here to here a sample of it speaking in MP3.

This new version has been modified to work with hijack's ;@EXEC_ONCE feature instead of preinit and also includes a command line option to setup a different time zone.

You can download it from http://www.zabaware.com/empeg

Very cool!

btw: Was is you that uploaded the DomoKun bootup animation?

Sweet program!...... I like it!

I'm in the EST time zone. The time was Friday April 4, 2003 @ 11:54pm

And the voice said.. Saturday April 5, 2003 11:54pm

Minor bug or did I do something wrong?

btw: Was is you that uploaded the DomoKun bootup animation?

Actually it was me that put it on RioCar.org. DomoKun made it and put it up here in the forums a long time ago, and it's been the boot logo on my unit ever since. When I noticed that it wasn't on Riocar.org, I knew people were being deprived of something great, so I put it up there.

I love it too! I want to make the RAAAR longer, but it's on my player too!

Firstly I love tts Clock, I've been using it since vR4. I just loaded vR6 on my player the new version works great and was easy to install. I put the required line ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/ttsclock to Hijack with a -6 hour time setting.
Now on to my question, when my player reboots I'm getting the greeting and time twice, is there something I should've deleted i.e. preinit (and how do I go about this) or something I need to add. I get the greet and time twice minus 6 hours on the second time, when the time difference ;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/ttsclock -t-6 is used in config.ini. if I remove the -t-6 from it I still hear the greeting and time twice except of course the times are the same. I have my time setting on the player set to my local timezone not UTC. If I remove the ;@EXEC_ONCE from Hijack in config.ini. then it plays the greeting and time just once. I believe this is just using the old version though.
I hope I explained it well enough.
Thanks for any help you can give.

http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/demos/index.html

they now do british, german, english american, english british, and other voices. male and female

Is it just me, or is the Date not corrected for time zone? Any time after 7:00 pm the spoken date is one day ahead, even though the Clock visual shows the correct date & time. I'm using:
2.0Final
Time Zone:Advanced:US:Central
;@EXEC_ONCE /drive0/var/ttsclock -t-5
Hijack 329 or 332
Also, should it take two reboots after changing the time before TTSClock speaks the new setting?
Inquiring minds want to know!

There seems to be a bug in TTS Clock. The date is not reading the offset from UTC correctly. In my case (-4 hours), the date rolls over to the next day at 8:00PM local which is really 00:00 UTC. Is there going to be a fix for this?

Thanks,
Jeff

Sorry for not posting for a while. I'll try to fix the bug over the weekend and I'll post an update here when it's fixed. I'm glad you guys like the program and my custom animation

In reply to:

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when my player reboots I'm getting the greeting and time twice, is there something I should've deleted i.e. preinit (and how do I go about this) or something I need to add.

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It is using both the new hijack version and the old preinit version. Delete the file b10tts from the folder /etc/preinit.d to remove the old version.

Bump.

Anything doing on the fix?

Very cool bit of programming, btw. I've completely outgeeked all my friends.

-Zeke

this is actually pretty easy to fix. you should be able to use date's -v option to pass your hour offset (passed to ttsclock in -t) to each of your date calls at the top of the script. check it out.

--dan.

Ok, I fixed the bug with the timezones. Release 7 is available for download from http://www.zabaware.com/empeg

Cool! I'm downloading now...

-Z

Slight issue:

I have the latest version (unless the version in the download section is v6). My timezone is set to Eastern (-5) and I have the -t-5 command option set. However it's reading 1 hour behind than it really is. So if it's 10pm it will say its 9pm instead. I can set it to -t-4 so it will say it correctly, but I was just wondering if maybe there was something else I'm missing or doing wrong.

I tried to check that link you put up here for v7 but it appears to be down.

My guess is that it's a UTC and summer time issue. Right now, we're at 4 hours behind UTC until the end of October. So your correct time difference is -4.

I suppose there ought to be an option to fix for summer time.

DomoKun-
Quick question: how is the voice volume determined? It seems to vary. I assume it sets to the volume at the time of the previous shutdown.

[warning: feature request ahead!]
Is there any way this can be put to a fixed volume with an entry in the .ini file? Regardless of the last music volume, I like a nice moderate voice volume. Since there's no way to turn it down I've sometimes announced the time & date to the whole neighborhood. Of course that's usually Saturday morning and I had my system cranked up when I came home late Friday night...

The day/date fix works perfectly, btw, so big kudos for that!

jbradshw- Bitt's right. I'm EST also and I've got it set -4 due to Daylight Savings.

-Zeke

Your assumption is correct, it sets the volume to whatever it was at the last shutdown. It is fairly simple to change it to use a fixed volume yourself. Just follow these steps:

• Open the file "ttsclock" with a text editor. (If you use windows notepad then be aware that line breaks will appear as little boxes. Don't remove any of these boxes or add any returns.)
• Find the text "/drive0/var/setvol"
• Change it to "/drive0/var/setvol ##" (no quotes, where ## is a percent from 0 to 100 for the volume level)
• After saving this file, you can use the automatic installation script to reinstall your modification, or if you know how to manually upload and set permissions you can just update this 1 file.
  

The TTSClock program currently has no daylight savings code, so while the empeg player app will automatically adjust the time during time changes, the ttsclock program won't. Maybe I'll make an updated version before the next time change to have automatic daylight savings time changes.

One of the more recent hijack features is having a set boot up volume, which would probably solve your problem. Then again, you might like how it works now. One thing to keep in mind though is that it's rarely a good idea to have your system turned up when you park, as everyone in the area then knows that you've got something other than the factory stereo in there. You may live in a lower crime area than I do, however.

Matthew

Cool, thanks!

-Zeke

Naturalvoices.com gives me a wav, will it play with the pcmplay-program? Does anyone already have some german voices for this cool feature?

Rolf

This is super cool...

You guys seen/heard the new StrongBad Clock???

Gives me the illusion that I have a tuner and am listening to the news

Got a link to StrongBad clock?

-Zeke

StrongBad Clock

Hey Stupid! The time is... 11... 17... AM.

SuhWeeT! I want SB in my empeg.

-Zeke

In reply to:

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Naturalvoices.com gives me a wav, will it play with the pcmplay-program? Does anyone already have some german voices for this cool feature?

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Yeah I used the at&t natural voices engine to make the voice that it uses now. I used the program cool edit (www.cooledit.com) to convert WAV files to PCM. It must be upsampled to 16-bit 44.1 stereo in order to work with the pcmplay program. It'd be cool if you or someone else wanted to create other voices.

Found at http://www.prog-link.com/wav2pcm a program for conversion. But it doesn't work as expected. The switches 16 bit and 44.1 kHz won't be used in wav -> pcm.
After some tests I gave up. Would it be helpful to give you the texts for conversion?

Rolf