TwoToneDetect New TwoToneDetect in the works - Python based

[emt036]

Hi Andy,

First of all, thanks for a great program. Second of all, quick question - there is no way to set the record length per tone set is there? If not, can I make a feature request? For most pages, a short record time is sufficient, but for one of the municipal fire departments I need it longer to catch when they finally get around to saying what the caller reported. Since I am autoposting to my own server, I am trying to keep the file size down, so don't want to make them all extra long if I can help it.

Thanks,
-Carsten

 

[fditdept]

I thing we figured out the problem we were having where TTD was working on one PC but when we installed in on a new PC it was not activating on our lower tones. We were using a Relm scanner so we borrowed a Uniden handheld unit and now it appears to be working on the new PC. Can anyone recommend a good scanner that would work with TTD I was also thinking if an older Motorola radio or pager set on the frequency would work? Any suggestion would be helpful.

 

[putterizer]

Hi Andy,

First of all, thanks for a great program. Second of all, quick question - there is no way to set the record length per tone set is there? If not, can I make a feature request? For most pages, a short record time is sufficient, but for one of the municipal fire departments I need it longer to catch when they finally get around to saying what the caller reported. Since I am autoposting to my own server, I am trying to keep the file size down, so don't want to make them all extra long if I can help it.

Thanks,
-Carsten

+1 on this. All the tone sets that i have are good with a 30 second recording with the exception of one. It would definitely be nice to have the ability to set record time per tone set.

Thanks Andy.

 

[aaknitt]

I thing we figured out the problem we were having where TTD was working on one PC but when we installed in on a new PC it was not activating on our lower tones. We were using a Relm scanner so we borrowed a Uniden handheld unit and now it appears to be working on the new PC. Can anyone recommend a good scanner that would work with TTD I was also thinking if an older Motorola radio or pager set on the frequency would work? Any suggestion would be helpful.

Early versions of v58 had a problem with low tone detection, not sure if that may have contributed to your issue or not. Another issue could have been having the volume set too low on the Relm scanner. Sometimes low frequencies get attenuated more. That can vary from radio to radio. If you have the levels set correctly, any receiver should work.

Andy

 

[Ofdpt23]

Hello. I have downloaded the twotonedetect software for use with my department. I have it set so it records the audio from my scanner, and saves the file on my computer. The trouble that i'm having is getting the software to communicate with my email client so it sends out the audio mp3. I've tried setting it up useing gmail email to send the file, as well as my isp provided email, both with no luck. Could you shed some light on what I might be doing wrong? please email me any sudgestions at ofdpt23@gmail.com

Thank you soo much for your help with figuring out my problems. Now that i have it all situated, it works great! Thank you for coming up with a program to do this.

To let everybody else know what my problem was, my two tone client would not send my pages to my email for distribution. What the problem was is that I had to go into my gmail settings and enable the pop message service so an external source could log in and send email through gmail. Once I got that configured properly, everything else just fell into place perfectly. I give this program a high recommendation.

 

[nawfire]

Awesome Program!..And a Question

Hi Andy,
First let me thank you for all the time and work you have (and still) put into this project.
We are a small rural fire department that covers a large area and many of our guys work in neighboring towns. Our paging repeater gives us pretty good coverage within the township but once you get into a shopping centre, warehouse, grocery store, etc the radio reliability really goes down. While cell phones don't work very reliably "within" our township, they work much better in town...where the stores, businesses etc are so TTD is a really welcome tool.
We are testing TTD and are really excited about it. During our first round of testing we got called out to a structural fire and had guys showing up that normally wouldn't have even known about it until we started calling their cell phones! Frickin' Amazing Program!
Two Questions that I can't find a recent answer for in the postings..
First, is there a Linux version available?
Second, is there a way to add a user's name into the tone.cfg file to make it easier to keep track of who we have entered, need to update etc?
Thanks,
Doug

 

[iceman977th]

Me and my friend are testing 58a for the next few days, we're hoping it goes well. The EM director was added to it and he loves the software, so we are hoping to move it to their office with a better VHF radio (versus my old Uniden scanner) and for quicker send times. Right now, it is hosted at my house, and uses the EM mail server, but we're hoping that localizing it will help.

 

[aaknitt]

Hi Andy,
First let me thank you for all the time and work you have (and still) put into this project.
We are a small rural fire department that covers a large area and many of our guys work in neighboring towns. Our paging repeater gives us pretty good coverage within the township but once you get into a shopping centre, warehouse, grocery store, etc the radio reliability really goes down. While cell phones don't work very reliably "within" our township, they work much better in town...where the stores, businesses etc are so TTD is a really welcome tool.
We are testing TTD and are really excited about it. During our first round of testing we got called out to a structural fire and had guys showing up that normally wouldn't have even known about it until we started calling their cell phones! Frickin' Amazing Program!
Two Questions that I can't find a recent answer for in the postings..
First, is there a Linux version available?
Second, is there a way to add a user's name into the tone.cfg file to make it easier to keep track of who we have entered, need to update etc?
Thanks,
Doug

Doug,

Glad it's working for you so far. The program is written in Python, so in theory it should be able to work under Linux, probably with a few modifications. I have had it start up under Ubuntu but that's as far as I got...never did a full test. I'm currently trying to get it running on a Raspberry Pi, which uses Debian Linux. However, I really, really, really hate Linux, so it's slow going ;-)

I have thought about adding a name field to associate with each email field, but I've never actually implemented it, mostly because I haven't thought of a good way to incorporate it into the Tones Editor GUI. I'm sure there's an elegant way to do it, but I haven't put much thought into it. If you have ideas, let me know.

Andy

 

[chandler]

my wont send me e-mails it says that its get's the tones but does not send me a e-mail at all any help?

 

[al911er]

I have this running on my home pc connected to a uniden scanner. I'm monitoring the fire pages for Pike County PA. Currently have 11 departments up and running with TTD 4 more to go. Its working great. Since the county does a page, announcement, then re-tones and repeats it, I have the ignore duplicate tones set for 30 seconds. The pages are going out fine using a G-mail account I setup specifically for this.
Since I have so far, about 30 cell phone numbers entered, (and a few email accounts) I made a simple word pad note of all the depts with each cell number and name to keep track of who is where. Yes its double work, sorta.. but makes finding a name much easier. It did take awhile to get a few of the tone sets correct because they were't exactly as listed on paper. So when I heard a dept get toned out, I quickly went down and looked on the re alert what tones showed up in the TTD program. put those in the editor and they worked. Tonight will be the test, literally. The county does its weekly test of all dept in one long list of tones. It'll be interesting to see how TTD handles it.. So far Very Happy.. info: V58 running on windows 7. The program is in my "google Drive" folder so I can access it when not at home and add numbers to the paging lists.

 

[iceman977th]

Been running 58a as the main software for the past couple days. Not a bit of problems as of yet. I love the text feature as well! Ever thought about working with an app developer and creating a push notification for iPhone/Android apps to alert when tones drop? I'd like to look into it but I don't know the first thing to do to go about it.

 

[oab2]

Second, is there a way to add a user's name into the tone.cfg file to make it easier to keep track of who we have entered, need to update etc?
Doug

What I do is use the normal email syntax in all my tones. Example: "bob fireman"<1234567890@email.com>,"jim smith"<12331231234@cell.com> (Note: this does not cause any problems for TTD.)

This way when I need to find someone in the tones I can either search by # or name. I send out a test/confirm message when a person desires to be added. I created my own tone set with audacity with a 440/500 AB toneset (these are far enough away from my tones to not cause problems). This includes a recorded message telling the recipient they have been added to the paging system but they must respond by text letting me know they got the message. Then I go into the email program (gmail) and find their response. The reason I have them respond by text is two fold. One I know it works for their phone (if not I try amr instead of mp3 in about 6 hours) and two, their phone number comes up as the sender in gmail, I search for that in my test tone list of contacts. when I find it I then remove it from the test list and add it to the appropriate fire tone list.

I hope that makes sense. My audacity tone file has all the different departments recorded confirmation messages in it. I just mute the ones I don't want to play on a given testtone.

 

[aaknitt]

What I do is use the normal email syntax in all my tones. Example: "bob fireman"<1234567890@email.com>,"jim smith"<12331231234@cell.com> (Note: this does not cause any problems for TTD.)

This way when I need to find someone in the tones I can either search by # or name. I send out a test/confirm message when a person desires to be added. I created my own tone set with audacity with a 440/500 AB toneset (these are far enough away from my tones to not cause problems). This includes a recorded message telling the recipient they have been added to the paging system but they must respond by text letting me know they got the message. Then I go into the email program (gmail) and find their response. The reason I have them respond by text is two fold. One I know it works for their phone (if not I try amr instead of mp3 in about 6 hours) and two, their phone number comes up as the sender in gmail, I search for that in my test tone list of contacts. when I find it I then remove it from the test list and add it to the appropriate fire tone list.

I hope that makes sense. My audacity tone file has all the different departments recorded confirmation messages in it. I just mute the ones I don't want to play on a given testtone.

Great tips, thanks!

Andy

 

[motomeso]

What a great idea! I'm going to starting doing this moving forward.

What I do is use the normal email syntax in all my tones. Example: "bob fireman"<1234567890@email.com>,"jim smith"<12331231234@cell.com> (Note: this does not cause any problems for TTD.)

This way when I need to find someone in the tones I can either search by # or name. I send out a test/confirm message when a person desires to be added. I created my own tone set with audacity with a 440/500 AB toneset (these are far enough away from my tones to not cause problems). This includes a recorded message telling the recipient they have been added to the paging system but they must respond by text letting me know they got the message. Then I go into the email program (gmail) and find their response. The reason I have them respond by text is two fold. One I know it works for their phone (if not I try amr instead of mp3 in about 6 hours) and two, their phone number comes up as the sender in gmail, I search for that in my test tone list of contacts. when I find it I then remove it from the test list and add it to the appropriate fire tone list.

I hope that makes sense. My audacity tone file has all the different departments recorded confirmation messages in it. I just mute the ones I don't want to play on a given testtone.

 

[aaknitt]

TTD on Raspberry Pi

Well I finally got my hands on a Raspberry Pi and spent a good chunk of the weekend trying to get TTD running on it. I've been learning a lot as I go!

Right now I have a stripped-down version of TTD running with a completely different tone detection algorithm and it seems to be working well after my initial testing, so I'm hopeful that I'll be able to eventually make something available for the Pi/Linux. Right now all of the config and tone info is hard-coded and I've left out a bunch of features. Once I'm confident in the tone detection algorithm, I'll flesh the rest of it out.

The "Pi" version will probably forego the GUI, as that adds some processor load that's not really needed in a semi-embedded environment. The tone detection algorithm that I am running on the Pi is something I've wanted to try for a long time, but was forced to in this case because I was running into problems with CPU overload during stacked pages with the original algorithm. If this algorithm proves to be reliable on the Pi, I'll probably roll it into the "main" version of the program also to help further reduce CPU load.

Right now on the PI CPU usage is around 12-15% while looking for tones and it spikes way up while doing the audio conversions, so if there's a bottleneck, that's where it will probably be.

Anyway, just thought I'd pass along my progress. The Pi is a neat little device...I'm thinking that it might be a good candidate to create a cheap "store and forward" simplex repeater from too.

Regards,

Andy

 

[krokus]

I have been looking at doing this very thing, but figured I would need to use the Python source code.

As for the audio converion, how difficult would it be to utilize the GPU for the process?

 

[aaknitt]

As for the audio converion, how difficult would it be to utilize the GPU for the process?

I have no idea

The Pi missed a bunch of tones last night so I still have more work to do. It seems to be decoding tones 2-4% off frequency but not with much repeatability. I think it may have to do with the resampling going on behind the scenes in pulseaudio, but I'm not sure yet. I need to do some more investigation. Once I have something working well I'll release it, but not sure when that will be, it's kind of a side project of TTD, which is in itself a side project :lol:

Andy

 

[oab2]

I have no idea

The Pi missed a bunch of tones last night so I still have more work to do. It seems to be decoding tones 2-4% off frequency but not with much repeatability. I

Andy

Andy I am wondering if you are running into issues I have been reading about the Pi having noisy sound capture. Some guys are saying using a USB mic input causes cracks and pops. I know the USB also runs the nic (thus only a 10/100 and not a gigabit lan). But some other Pi users have said when they are using nic they are getting bad recordings.

Raspberry Pi &bull; View topic - Ethernet noise interferance with a USB Sound card

Not sure right now where I read another post about the issue but google should help

 

[Forts]

Hi Andy... I think I may have discovered a bug in the Tones Editor. I loaded in tones.cfg which consists of about 20 A-B tone sets and 3 longtones. I can go thru the A-B tones no problem with all the proper info displayed, but once I click on a longtone entry the data no longer changes. For example I click on Dept #1's A-B tones, everything is good. Click on Dept#2's longtone... everything is good. Click back on Dept #1 and it still shows Dept #2's longtone info.

Great work on everything else though! And the Tones Editor is quite handy BTW...

 

[aaknitt]

Hi Andy... I think I may have discovered a bug in the Tones Editor. I loaded in tones.cfg which consists of about 20 A-B tone sets and 3 longtones. I can go thru the A-B tones no problem with all the proper info displayed, but once I click on a longtone entry the data no longer changes. For example I click on Dept #1's A-B tones, everything is good. Click on Dept#2's longtone... everything is good. Click back on Dept #1 and it still shows Dept #2's longtone info.

Great work on everything else though! And the Tones Editor is quite handy BTW...

I'm not seeing this happen in the Tones Editor when I try it...anyone else able to reproduce it? Forts, can you send me your tones.cfg file to try out to see if I can make it happen?

Thanks,

Andy