October 8, 2006 progress

Sunday was 4 hours of yard work and a very unhappy little boy so minimal progress was made. I decided to research speech chips and got off on all kinds of tangents. Makezine.com BLOG is addictive and I was up way too late Saturday night reading it.

So anyway, in a former life I was a midnight engineer for a buddy’s fledgling company. I had designed and programmed a device to translate the clock synchronization signal of one master clock to that of a tower clock controller. This was going to be a big product for his company so he had several PCB’s manufactured along with several sets of parts. Unfortunately the company went bust. I was contacted by the major investor and asked if I wanted the leftover electronics stock before it was “tossed”. Long story short I have a surplus of PCB’s, LCD’s, relays, etc… The reason I explain all this is because I had designed the system to use a switching power supply and had designed the 5V DC supply in one corner of the board. A few minutes with a hack saw and I had a nice PCB for a 5V DC switching PS. I also had all the parts to stuff it and as luck would have it, the diode bridge layout matched the .156” power header part. So, now I have a very stable high current PS (5A IIRC) that I can power from my stock of RC batteries (LiPo and NiMh up to 18VDC IIRC). I will go back any look at my notes to see what the design criteria were, but the system was capable for switching 4 relays at the same time if need be.

Back to the speech chips. Devantech’s is too expensive (at least for now) so it’s down to the SpeakJet or the new (and as far as I can tell not yet released) Savage Innovations Soundgin. Interestingly Magnevation which makes the SpeakJet is a partner in some fashion with Savage and both chips are very similar in that they use phonemes to generate speech. They are the same price but the Soundgin’s manual and software have given it a very strong lead on my score sheet. I’ll have to hack together a demo board with amp, but the schematic is presented. Since both use RS232 communications, I will most likely switch to a I2C LCD (a good excuse to play with I2C again) maybe even a graphic one I have laying around.

So, I think I will spend lunch making a parts order for a speech circuit J

Onward,
Jay