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Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text

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On 7/30/19 10:01 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:
> 	I've been trying to do the impossible, more like the
> impractical, for some time now so I need a knowledge infusion.
> 
> 	I want to be able to read the VGA output of a computer,
> do OCR on it and have ASCII text.
> 
> 	As a computer user who happens to be blind, one of the
> most frustrating issues is the fact that except for expensive
> servers, none of these boxes output any machine readable text
> when booting up or in setup mode such as when the coin cell that
> powers the CMOS BIOS gives up the ghost and one needs to do a
> setup on it, etc.
> 
> 	It seems as though we may have reached one milestone in
> that one can buy a usb frame grabber that spits out UVC
> webcam-style video.  The representative of the company which
> makes the device  told me that most common flavors of VGA cards
> produce signals that would work with the device but some odd-ball
> cards won't work with it which makes sense.
> 
> 	Assuming most will work, what one would have is frame
> after frame of digitized video.  If this is a setup screen, the
> only thing likely to be changing until you do something is the
> cursor may be blinking otherwise, it's going to be pretty stable.
> 
> 	You'd have one frame of video to do the OCR on and then
> one does something such as hit the Tab or one of the arrow keys
> and then you grab another frame and read it and so forth.
> 
> 	Are there any free projects out there which take the raw
> video as input and output text as output since the frame grabber
> is just the beginning of the beast and then you have to convert
> it to text and maybe some method of determining where the
> highlight as in cursor position is so as to know what one is
> about to select?
> 
> 	Needless to say, but saying it anyway to avoid confusion,
> one would have the frame grabber and text engine on a different
> working debian computer since the sick one isn't capable of doing much
> until the BIOS gets set correctly.
> 
> 	I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
> debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
> to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
> brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
> reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
> the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
> drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
> in.  Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
> the boot sequence has fallen back to  the useless one where the
> floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
> CDROM.
> 
> Martin McCormick WB5AGZ

What about using a computer whose CMOS Setup utility is accessible via 
the serial port?  This article indicates the Dell 2450 is capable:

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/rhl-biosserial.html


David

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Thread

Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-07-30 19:10 +0200
  Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2019-07-30 20:10 +0200
  Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2019-07-30 20:20 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com> - 2019-07-30 20:50 +0200
  Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2019-07-30 21:20 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2019-07-31 20:00 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2019-07-31 20:30 +0200
        Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Doug McGarrett <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> - 2019-07-31 21:40 +0200
          Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2019-07-31 23:00 +0200
        Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Joe Pfeiffer <pfeiffer@cs.nmsu.edu> - 2019-07-31 22:50 +0200
          Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> - 2019-07-31 23:10 +0200
  Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text john doe <johndoe65534@mail.com> - 2019-07-30 21:30 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-08-01 19:00 +0200
  Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text David Christensen <dpchrist@holgerdanske.com> - 2019-07-30 23:20 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-08-01 19:40 +0200
  Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Felix Miata <mrmazda@earthlink.net> - 2019-08-01 19:50 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text rhkramer@gmail.com - 2019-08-01 20:20 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text Paul Sutton <zleap@disroot.org> - 2019-08-01 21:40 +0200
      Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-08-02 14:50 +0200
    Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text "Martin McCormick" <martin.m@suddenlink.net> - 2019-08-02 14:00 +0200

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