Here are the specifications for the media used on your Tiny Museum Tour Device:
- Images must be 128 x 128 pixel 24-bit color .bmp files
- Audio must be mono, 16bit, 22KHz .wav files
We have a great guide on converting sound files to these specifications. You can record your own tour audio using the microphone built into your computer as the source in Audacity, and even layer music under it like a real museum tour recording!
To give it a bit of a machine-generated feel, I decided to use text-to-speech software for narration. On mac os, you can use the say
command in a terminal to do this.
Using 'say'
The say
command work in the terminal on the mac os. Open a terminal and try it out by typing this and pressing enter:
say "Welcome to the Tiny Museum Tour Device."
If you want to capture the speech as an audio file, you can add the -o flag followed by a filename:
say "Welcome to the Tiny Museum Tour Device." -o welcome.aiff
This will save the welcome.aiff file to the directory you're currently in in the terminal. The 'say' command cannot save .wav files directly, so you'll want to open them in Audacity and then convert them as per the guide linked above.
No mac? Do you have a Raspberry Pi?
We have another tutorial to do speech synthesis on Raspberry Pi.
Windows
We suggest looking for a web to speech site. Here is one but you need to register to download the sound files.
Image Conversion
You can use any image file you like as your source files -- the ones I used were downloaded from the National Gallery of Art's Images collection.
In order to use them on the HalloWing, scale your images to 128 x 128. Unless your source image is already square to begin with, this will lead to distortion. So, you'll want to scale the image proportionally so that it's longest dimension is 128 pixels, and then use black letterbox or pillarbox rectangles to fill the other dimension to 128 pixels without distortion.
There are many simple tools you can use for image file conversion, such as Preview on mac os and MS Paint on Windows. More sophisticated tools such as Photoshop and GIMP work great as well, but have steeper learning curves.
You can also search online for tools that can be used in the browser for image conversion.
Take a Tour
Now, you can proudly display your Tiny Museum Tour Device on a small stand, bookshelf, or wall! Press the copper pads to change images, and don't forget you can recharge the battery at any time by plugging the HalloWing into USB power!
Page last edited March 08, 2024
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