@fireborn Haha well written and sadly accurate as always.

On my setup though, weirdly enough I have one big difference with yours when trying to use espeakup and pipewire/pulseaudio at the same time.

Instead of locking espeakup out, it does the oposite. Espeakup is the only thing allowed to talk, because it grabbed onto the alsa device like sticky glue and won't ever let go of it. Meanwhile my audio session itself can't make any sound at all.

I've been wanting to build an hardware synth for years so that we could just use it with both speakup and orca, but the project basically went almost nowhere after an attempted port of espeak-ng to a cortex m7 microcontroller that was never completed.

I'd want to make this available for a low cost obviously, not like the hardware synths of the 80s.

@xogium I made a similar thing using a pi0 and a wm8960 chip with 2 ohm speakers.

@xogium I went that route because I was a broke hs student at the time, and just needed to be ale to read kernel boot logs and the initramfs shell.