Play sound through external USB card on Armbian

General
1

Hello there, I'm new to the Node-RED but as it is so useful I think I'll stay with it for much longer :slight_smile:

I've got a question related to playing sound using external USB card. My instance is working on Orange Pi One board running Debian-based Armbian with USB card plugged into it. I'm using web editor through local network and here's the question: is it possible to play sound without need to have browser window opened? Especially version with Text to Speech, like with using node-red-contrib-play-audio with browser.

The goal is to be able to alert through sound notification when my monitoring flow finds out about an error.

Really looking forward to hear from you guys!
Cheers

2

There are several command line TTS applications that you can call using an exec node. I’ve used espeak before now. There are several others. Not sure which would work on Armbian

3

Thanks, @dceejay! That was really helpful. I've managed to successfully install and configure Espeak (to be honest not without many beginner issues), works like charm :slight_smile:

For anyone trying to do something similar in the future:

  1. check if you are able to play any sound through external USB card using command line interface

  2. remember to set correct values at /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf file (both card and device number, get those values using aplay -l command)

  3. update default values at /etc/asound.conf config file, it may be necessary to use slave values:

    pcm.!default {
    type plug
    slave {
    pcm "hw:0,0"
    }
    }

    ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 0
    }

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