The Tin Man - Velleman "Voice Changer Kit"

22 Oct 2021

Time for more silliness with the Tin Man. I have been thinking about what kind of voice he should have and spotted the Velleman Voice Changer Kit for $11.

I know it says Whadda on the box but inside the PCB and the instruction sheet says Velleman.

The main IC is a Holtec HT8950 and the passives are arranged pretty much the same as the Holtec datasheet. There are buttons for vibrato, pitch adjustment, and the "robot" voice. There is also an LM386N to amplify the output with volume adjustment. Power is supplied by a 9V battery but I'm using my bench power supply. I don't intend to place it in the robot but rather record the voice and store it on the JQ6500.

The pads for the DIP sockets seemed large/close together and I had a probably unfounded concern that they would bridge easily while being soldered. So I used a small, but what seemed sufficient, amount of solder. It worked right off the bat but was intermittent. I debugged it by beeping out the traces and found a poor connection so I went back and touched up all the joints with a bit more solder. I didn't like the power and speaker connections and substituted my own screw terminals that were at hand.

So how well does it work? Not that good really :-). And the demonstration at the Velleman site doesn't sound any better. Below is a short video with my best robot voice with the speaker installed in the Tin Man.

Feedback is a problem if the microphone is near the speaker and I had to turn away from it and speak softly during use. Free software like Audacity and websites on the internet provide much more sophisticated voice control but I'll probably use this anyway for the Tin Man. After all, I need to get full value out of my $11.

I have most of the 3D printing done but am still playing around with the Tin Man's eyes. Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Other Tin Man Blogs

The Tin Man - Smooth Moves | element14 | Frank Milburn

The Tin Man - Getting Started | element14 | Frank Milburn