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Simputer demos
The following is the list of demos shown at the launch. Each of the demos highlights a particular capability of the Simputer. All the demos were proof-of-capability demos and not complete applications.
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Text-to-speech: The ability of the Simputer to do text to speech conversion in four languages was demonstrated. The Simputer welcomed the audiences in four languages, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and English.
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Voice recording and playback: A simple application that uses the built in microphone to record a short audio clip from the user and to play it back was demonstrated. This capability forms the basis of several applications, most important being voice mail.
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Market prices: An IML application that obtains the prices of commodities and speaks out the prices. The full application will connect the Simputer via built-in modem to a ppp server and access the price information from a remote site. However, at the launch the Simputer was not connected via modem and the prices obtained are from a local file.
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Kannada Literacy guide: A simple IML application that provides an audio-visual tool for basic literacy education. Simple words, picture of the object described and the text to speech conversion of the word form the basis of the application. A simple test for the learner to do self evaluation is also included.
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Smart card capability: The Simputer has a built in smartcard and IML is aware of smart cards. A simple IMLi demo that reads in an inserted smart card and populates a form with the values obtained was demonstrated.
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Infrared communication: The ability of a Simputer to communicate with a PC was demonstrated.
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Tapatap: A novel character input application that uses a 3x3 grid to input all characters on a standard keyboard is the default character input mechanism on the Simputer. This was demonstrated by entering Unix commands 'ls' and 'cd' on a rxvt terminal displayed on the Simputer.
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MP3 player: A simple perl/Tk interface for MP3 was used to demonstrate the Cd quality audio that can be produced on a Simputer. However, only mono audio was played. Stereo capability can be built in, but is not present in the current version of the Simputer.
A set of about 7 Simputers were used for the demos. Most of the IML demos could be played from any of the Simputers. However, some of them had specific features exclusively. For example, only on two Simputers the smartcard access was tested to be working. One other Simputer was exclusively retained for the MP3 player since several songs were loaded. Where real-time text-to-speech was required, another Simputer which had the entire phoneme library was used.
What was not demonstrated
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The soft modem: In the lab we have a Simputer connecting to another Simputer through the softmodem at 2400 baud. A Simputer could also connect to a standard modem at 1200 baud. Data transfer was possible at higher speeds, but due to a drift in the crystal clock output that is more than what could be handled by standard modems, higher level protocols like ppp could not operate. We are currently fixing this problem.
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The USB slave capability: The original Simputer spec calls for a USB master capability. Due to the SA1111 problem and its later exclusion, the USB capability was downgraded to a slave configuration. This USB works fairly ok, but exhibits intermittent packet losses that are unacceptably high. This is another problem that we expect to solve soon.
- The built-in speaker: Three of the Simputers had built-in speakers. But the quality of output was not satisfactory and hence were not demoed.
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