Do-It-Yourself Hacked Billy Bass

Introduction

There are three major steps to creating your own Linux-hacked Billy Bass. First, you have to literally hack the Bass to interface it to your desktop, laptop or embedded PC. Then you have to build the control software and run a system check. Finally--the fun part--you create your own sound bites. If you want to do even more than that, great, check out the future plans for the Billy Bass. If you want to created the Embedded Billy Bass, a Billy Bass with the control computer inside the frame, there are additional steps.

Standard Disclaimer. Although this worked for me, what you are undertaking may destroy your printer port, your Billy Bass or even your spare time. If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Part I. Hacking the Bass

Our goal is to have a Bass that interfaces with the printer port. You'll need these supplies:

  1. Big Mouth Billy Bass
  2. Phillips head screwdriver
  3. Hobby cutting tool (e.g., the Dremel)
  4. Soldering gun and solder
  5. Parallel Port Breakout Box
  6. Network cables or high quality phone line cables. At least six wires inside.
  7. 2 4.7 kOhm resistors
  8. Circuit board
  9. Audio patch cables
  10. Multimeter - optional but highly recommended

Step 1. Open up your Billy Bass. There's not much in there. Snip the yellow wires that lead to the red button in front. Unscrew the control board.

Step 2. Neatly remove the CMOS controller from the control board. The goal is to expose the ten lines that connect the control board to the control chip. Use the cutting tool to expose the large conductor circled above. This is ground.

Step 3. Cut a long strip of network cable, long enough to extend from the control computer to the Billy Bass. Strip the all the ends.

Step 4. Solder one wire from the cable (I suggest black) to the ground exposed in Step 1. Solder three wires from the cable to the pins boxed above.

Step 5. Construct the above circuit. Use the yellow leads to the red button for the switch. Connect logic out to one of the wires in the cable (I suggest a yellow one).Use the stock Billy Bass power supply for V+ and ground.

Step 6. Connect the other end of the five cable wires from above to the breakout box. Connect ground wire to pin 25, the boxed wires to pins 2 through 5 as show above and the button circuit wire to pin 13.

Step 7. Wire the patch cables to the Billy Bass speaker.

Step 8. Reassemble the Billy Bass.

Part II. Build the Control Software

Perhaps when this is a more finished product a binary will be offered. Until then you'll have to build the control software from source. You'll need the following:

  1. Linux distribution
  2. Sound card
  3. A free parallel port
  4. g++ and GNU make (comes with most Linux distributions)
  5. bash shell
  6. root access

Step 1. Download and install the Open Source Audio Library Project. and QpThreads. Follow the directions for each project. However usually it goes like this:

tar xvzf cool-library.tar.gz
cd cool-library
./configure
make
su
make install

Step 2 Download the latest source for the Hacking Big Mouth Billy Bass Project.

Step 3 Extract the source into your home directory. For example 

tar -xvzf billysrc.tar.gz

Step 4 Change into bmbb-linux and type 

make

Step 5 Connect your Bass to the parallel port using the breakout box. At this point do not power up the Bass.

Step 6 Become root and execute 

./start_bmbb haha.wav
while watching the breakout box. You should have seen light 2 blinking off and on. But at the end of the program, the output pins 2,3 and 4 should be off.

Step 8 Now, the moment of truth. Power up Billy Bass. Again, as root, execute 

./start_bmbb haha.wav
At this point you should get the full show.

If you've done all this, then no doubt your're ready to create your own content for the Bass. If so, read on...

Part III. Creating Your Own Sound Bites

In this section I will show you an example of how I created one sound bite for Billy Bass. Don't be intimidated, it's not hard. I can do a satisfactory transcription in 5 minutes, you can to. But before you can begin you'll need to read up on how to identify vowels, plosives and other types of sounds the mouth can make by looking at spectrograms. Check out the acoustic phonetics tutorials that I used. All we need to do is identify when vowels are spoken. I have found that is all it takes to make a believable lip synch.

I strongly suggest you obtain Wavesurfer, which will be used in this example. It is powerful and has an intuitive interface. You can use other transcription programs, in theory, as long as they product TIMIT output.

Step 1. I started Wavesurfer.

Step 2. I opened the WAV file. I selected "Speech analysis" when the dialog asked me what kind of configuration I wanted.

Step 3. I right clicked the project area and selected "Create pane", then "Transcription."

Step 4. I iteratively selected regions of sound, and played them, and entered the English letters for those sounds above them. The result looked like the following:

Step 5. When I was satisfied with the transcription, I saved it by right clicking on the project area and selected "Save transcriptions." This created a file with the extension .lab in the same directory as the WAV file.

Step 6. To get the Bass to lip synch the file, I just made sure the WAV and lab file were in the same directory. I used 

./start_bmbb soundfile.wav