I`m trying desperately to catch up with a load of work I have shelved currently, and thought today might be a nice day to start hitting a couple of these projects,
Namely getting Speech for my ZED computer.
it`s based on the SP0256-AL2 chip, salvaged from an old BBC Micro in way of a Cheetah "Sweet talker" board that I bought off ebay some years ago and never even got to testing it, it Does work though.
I`v set it up on ZEDs Breadboard card, and on all of my breadboards I have a resident Arduino Nano on there ((it can be Soooooo many things! and with such a tiny footprint it`s worth keeping aboard) even if it`s just for cheap 5v power supply).
the Cheetah board provides nothing more than a simple lowpass filter for the PWM Digital out (the speech) and a BC108 transistor based amp, and the crystal cct. most of the pins don`t come out at all, just the 2 main crtl lines of Data ready and data Busy.
oh yeah, and there`s only 6 address lines!
now That to me lends itself towards a rom (EEPROM in my case) based state machine, esp having 2 free data lines to feed the 6 address lines of the SP0256.
I`m thinking that in a simple 8kx8 EEPROM, I can 16 phonemes per word (more than plenty), and 512 words.
a gated Clock to cycle the lower 4 bits of the address, and a simple 74245 for the Upper address bits to select the Word I want said.
there were/are a few ways I can go about this, teach it English basics, or just have a word database, I`m going for the data base idea for simplicity`s sake.
after which it would be a fairly trivial affair to add Banks of these roms at 512 word a time if need be.
it`s like Max Headroom on Acid at the moment, and using an arduino to shove in the data, I`v gone from that to something akin to Alien Rap by simply adjusting the Millisecond timings and cycle-types.
when the novelty wears off, i`ll probably start working again, but for now it`s had me doubled up with laughter!
so yeah, no Pictures or fancy stuff today, just a quick update 