VIC-VODER How-To Guides

Procedure #1: How-To get to the SD card.

The process to access the SD Card is not difficult. Read over all of the steps below to understand the process. Then just follow along step-by-step:

1. Remove the screws from the top four corners of the VIC-VODER case.

2. With the User Port connector facing you, gently lift the top half of the case up about an inch and flip it over to the left so that it is resting upside down directly to the left of the bottom half of the case.

3. Remove the two Raspberry Pi restraining screws at the locations indicated in red on the diagram below.

4. Gently lift up the circuit board and rotate it about 45-degrees counter-clockwise, such that you can get at the SD Card from the right.

5. Grasp the SD Card by its sides with you thumb and pointer finger, and gently rock it side to side as you pull it toward you to free it from its framed enclosure.

6. Please note that under the SD Card is a loose-leaf piece of paper diagraming the GPIO pins. Use this document to re-connect the five GPIO wires should you accidently disconnect them. (Keep this diagram in a safe place by storing it again inside of the VIC-VODER case when you are through.)

Procedure #2: How-To write a new image to the SD Card.

The process to re-image the SD Card is not difficult. Read over all of the steps below to understand the process. Then just follow along step-by-step:

1. Grab the latest firmware release from http://goo.gl/nx64h and download it to a convienent location on your PC.

2. Follow the Easy SD Setup link on http://goo.gl/nx64h to learn to write the IMG file to the SD Card using your Mac or PC. There are a number of simple tools available to do the image transfer job. For example, I use the free PiWriter application on my OSX MacBook.

Procedure #3: How-To perform a /boot partition upgrade.

Boot partition upgrades are a quick and easy way for developers to contribute to the VIC-VODER community. When you insert VIC-VODER's 4GB Class 10 SDHC card into a Mac or PC, the /boot partition becomes visible to the operating system. Developers can release a package containing files to be extracted and placed there by end-users.

The key to making this distribution method work is the inclusion of an upgrade.sh shell script to manage the install. VIC-VODER will run upgrade.sh during its power-on process, if found in /boot. A courtesy reboot will happen after upgrade.sh is run, and it will be deleted after execution.

The "root" user will run upgrade.sh, so updated system files, like rc.local, can be copied to their correct location, /etc/rc.local. Other than rc.local, there are really only two other files that have a "correct" location and that is the startup scripts for the server and client, ttsd and ttsc, respectively. They should go into /etc/init.d.

Everything else just runs out of /boot. Of particular interest, festival_client.pl, is the workhorse for VIC-VODER. A lot of potential exists here to extend the features and functionality of the overall system. Imagination is really the only limitation.

For example:

Additional TTY customizations beyond, "set tty [hi|lo]".
It might be fun to translate English to Pig-Latin or Klingon.
Discard the Scott Adams adventure series, "What shall I do now?," which gets a little tiresome from being repeated so often during game-play.
Another option might be to include a means to send Scheme-like commands to Festival's embedded interpreter from BASIC on the Commodore side.
An ability to translate Votrax-style "~phoneme?" codes and pass to Festival.