As I may have mentioned, I have been working to extract a sound from the old printouts. I spent some time using OpenCV to convert some low quality images into grey scale so that I could use Tesseract on them. It did need hand correction – but I think I can see some ways of getting around this.
I spent a while converting the data into both square and sine waves. The sine wave was written to a wav file to allow me to listen to it and to pop it into Audacity to explore it. There are quite a few issues. My next move is to use a Raspberry Pi with a Piezo buzzer to see how this changes the audio response as the original mainframe machine had a hooter.
One challenge is that this is designed for a particular machine that no longer exists and the frequency does need altering to either MIDI or Hertz ranges (which can of course be done). Listening to the work and running the code was more instructive than seeing the graph as a plot. So much more to take apart and do, but progress has taken place.
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