BRLTTY Driver for the Tieman Voyager Braille Display This is the user-space-only version of the driver. Version 0.10 (March 2004) Copyright 2004 by Stéphane Doyon <s.doyon@videotron.ca> This is a partial rewrite of the driver which functions entirely from user-space (whereas the previous driver depended on a kernel driver for the USB communication with the Voyager display). This driver supports the Tieman Voyager 44 and 70. The driver works with later 2.4.x kernels and with at least some versions in the 2.6.x series. Note that the kernel brlvger driver used with the old BRLTTY driver does not work properly with 2.6.x kernels. Many thanks to the Tieman people: Corand van Strien, Ivar Illing, Daphne Vogelaar and Ingrid Vogel. They provided us with a Braille display (as well as programming information) so that we could write this driver. They replaced the display when it broke and they answered our technical questions. It is very motivating when companies take an interest in such projects and are so supportive. Thanks to Andor Demarteau <ademarte@students.cs.uu.nl> who got this whole project started and beta-tested all our early buggy attempts. Thanks to Stéphane Dalton who wrote the initial version of the old kernel driver. Without his initiative this project would not have been a success. This rewrite of the driver should allow more flexibility, but is as of yet very young and not thoroughly tested. When BRLTTY will be running, press the leftmost routing key to bring up the help screen so you can read the details of the key bindings. Users of the 2.6.x kernel may experience some difficulties. The old kernel driver, which is included in the official kernels, will actually get in the way of this driver as it will claim the USB interface to the display, and I've seen some hangs occur when BRLTTY asks to disconnect the kernel driver. If you have this problem you should make sure the kernel module called brlvger is not inserted into your kernel. One simple way to prevent that module from auto-loading is to rename the module file so it isn't found. cd /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/usb/ mv brlvger.o brlvger.o.hold If lsmod shows the brlvger module as already loaded then do rmmod brlvger The old kernel driver will soon be pulled out of 2.6.x kernels. BRLTTY currently assumes the default braille device to be a serial port, so you must tell it that it is in fact USB. Either provide the "--with-braille-device=usb:" option when running the BRLTTY top-level ./configure command, or use the braille-device parameter in your BRLTTY configuration file (/etc/brltty.conf): braille-device usb: If you actually have more than one Voyager display connected at the same time, you can also specify the serial number of the device that you want to use. This driver knows a number of driver parameters which you can pass via the braille-parameters clause in your BRLTTY configuration file (/etc/brltty.conf) or via brltty's -B (--braille-parameters=) command line option. InputMode: This parameter specifies whether or not the eight top keys function as a braille keyboard. When set to "no" (the default), top key combinations perform various navigational and operational functions. When set to yes", they function as an 8-dot braille keyboard. If B, C, or B+C is pressed along with any top key combination then it's as if this parameter were set to "no". There are only a handful of BRLTTY users, so if you are trying out this driver, please drop us a note, even if you have no problems! Note to BRLTTY developers: This is my first attempt at combining the key binding definitions with the help file text in one place, through annotations in the braille.c file. If you change the key bindings, currently you need python installed to be able to rebuild the help files.
