Resolved by WBS00001!
A bit of an unusual request, but there is reasoning behind what I'm about to ask. So my question is...
Is there a way to display a robots spoken response as text with ARC?
Let me explain. Speech synthesis for a robots response is not an option here. You speak to a robot using speech recognition and the robot responds with text displayed on the computer screen. Now using the Pandorabot control will do this showing the robots response in the debug window, but the text is too small.
If your familiar with Pandorabot, you'll know that when you have a published bot, you get your own page where your Pandorabots response is displayed and you can add HTML code to change the text layout. This is something like what I'm looking to do via ARC. I could use the Pandorabot portal, but I would need control commands which are imbedded in the bots responses to activate when the response is given.
The reasoning behind this, is for someone who is hard of hearing to interact and converse with the robot, so you see why speech synthesis can't really be used in this situation. I might be overlooking something obvious here, or there might be something that I'm unaware of, so ANY input anyone can offer on this really would be gratefully appreciated.
Cheers,
Steve.
@WBS.
My brain is refreshed today do I gave your program another go... And I t works great. Nice job indeed, and thank you for your work on this. I am very grateful indeed. I think I was over thinking things last night (as well as being really tired) as its a lot easier to display text than what I thought. eyeroll
If I could make a couple of suggestions though if that's cool.
One would be to be able to change the background colour or add an image so it blends in with any set ARC wallpapers that might be set.
And the other, not so much of a suggestion but more of a question, is there a way of adding a script to bring the display to the foreground? When the display is up but you then use an ARC control, the display is pushed to the background (as Windows does), so having a line of code to bring the display back to the foreground after another computer/robots response would be great. I can't think how to do that with a script.
In regards to the Pandorabot control, I thought that might be an issue. But like you say, it shouldn't be that difficault to add as the returned text is already displayed in the debug window. I don't think it's worth starting a new thread as we already have DJ's attention. I hope he see's this and think it's worthy of adding a vairable for this. I really hope so, as this would be quite an important addition for me personally (as I'll mention below).
I am surprised that there has not been much interest or input from other members on this entire subject. For such a simple tool, I can see so many uses for this like for kids education in robotics where some children my be hard of hearing and/or poor vision. This would be a great way to get this kids to interact with a robot platform. And, as in my case, family members who are hard of hearing who want to interact with a robot, for example, a scripted reminder "it's time to take your pills" would be better as large colourful font displayed text where speech syntheses wouldn't be adequate for this. I appreciate this may not be suitable for every robot, especially ones without onboard computers, but as ARC has to use a computer, then the option would be there for any type of robot using the EZ-Robot platform.
There are many more examples I can think of, and I'm sure there are other current or future members who are hard of hearing who would appreciate having this ability, but I guess the lack of responses here says otherwise which surprises me a bit.
BTW, I haven't tried the EZ-Display on my tablet yet, but I will do later today and let you know how it goes (although I can't see any ussurs using it in portrait mode as the window can be resized).
The colors are which are words, ie red, green, etc are universal computer colors. You can find that by searching c# color names. Or html color names. Those are the two most popular resources I use.
As for using RGB values (red, green, blue). The colors are numbers between 0 and 255. You will find programming languages and html use the same. The alpha is transparency. It is also a number between 0 and 255. I'm on my phone, but I'm certain there was an example of using rgb in the sketch pad example project. If not, I'll add it.
As for your ez display program... Awesome. May I suggest converting it into a ARC skill plugin? Take a look at the plugin howto and there is also source code for the new plugins that I had created in the list.
@DJ.
WBS done great didn't he? I agree with you that EZ-Dislay should be available as an ARC plug-in, as it's deffintaly worthy of being one.
I don't know if you read my last post (#42), but would you concider adding a vairable to extract the response text from the Pandorabot control to display on WBS's EZ-Display?
@DJ Sures Thanks for your reply. At least that confirms what I wrote back in post #35. I also listed the other colors back there.
There are 2 examples of using Sketch Pad but they only address a couple of points concerning it's use.
I would like to convert it to a plug-in but I still have a steep learning path to working with C# and the MS programming environment. Not to mention the fact I am averse to working with anything which has the letter "C" in it.
It's difficult for me to work up the enthusiasm to do it at the moment. Thus my penchant for using a text file interface and going with what I am familiar. The only problem is that the text file interface is slow. Considerably slower than I expected even.
What I would like to see in ARC is a way to load a script from a text file. That would open up all sorts of possibilities by itself.
@SteveG I can put in a background "color picker" option, no problem. Putting in a background image would be a bit more difficult however. I'll look into it.
Also, no problem on making the display stay on top of other windows. There is a setting especially for that in windows. I'll put in an option for that as well.
Making it do that from a script should also be possible by allowing for some control characters to be recognized. For example, you could send the character sequence "<StayOnTopOn>" to the display either by concatenating it to the beginning of a string you want to send, or simply by itself like this:
To turn that off you could send: "<StayOnTopOff>"
Concatenating the On-Off code to a string you wish to send anyway is the best method since it eliminates that extra Sleep(2000).
In a similar way the other options could be changed in value via text sent from the ARC making the Display program fully remote controlled. Doing that was the next phase of this project I had planned anyway.
Then there is the two-way communication as suggested by Justin. Also quite feasible.
I'll add the pandorabot response to a variable.
@DJ.
Thanks for getting back to me and thanks so much for adding that. Having that vairable will be very useful indeed, and I for one would be very grateful to you for that.
@WBS.
Okay, that would be great. In regards to having the display in the foreground,I figured there would be a command for keeping there, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to do it. Having it as an option would be a great addition.
Again, great work with EZ-Display (I like the name too).
Steve.
@WBS.
I just tried EZ-Display on my Acer W3... It worked great, better than I expected in portrait mode actually. Half the screen is ARC, and resizing the display fills the other half of the screen with good visibility when using the font size option you added.
Thanks again for this. I'm really pleased you are part of the community.
Steve.
@WBS.
One last little suggestion I wanted to add, and that is having a line space inbetween each of the robots responses in the display.