Demo Board Questions

jaeg

I am going to get the demo board and have a few questions:
Does it come with a power supply or do I need to get one myself? If so what kind? I'm guessing it is a wall adapter.
Can I output to the TV and VGA at the same time.

Hardest Question:
Could I do speech recognition like a Furby does? You know how it compares a sound wave to the one it received? I figured that if an original Furby could do it this thing could.

Thanks

Mike Green

1) The Demo Board doesn't come with a power supply. Any wall adapter that can provide 6V to 9V at 500mA to 1A should work fine. The Demo Board has low dropout 5V and 3.3V regulators on the board. A 7.5V or 6V regulator would be best. Parallax sells a 7.5V 1A wall adapter that matches. The plug is a standard 2.1mm ID center positive. If you get the Propeller Starter Kit, it includes the AC adapter.

2) Yes, you can output to the TV and VGA at the same time if you incorporate both I/O drivers into your program. I've often used the TV output for debugging while the VGA output was the display for the program.

3) You should be able to do it. I'm not aware of any existing software, but the hardware is there and the analog to digital conversion can be done on-chip. There is some really neat speech synthesis software you can download that synthesizes several voices doing harmony in stereo, so the chip is more than capable. The Propeller Tool comes with sample I/O drivers to copy the sound from the microphone to the headphones or to plot it on a graphics display.

johnfl68

If you get the Propeller Starter Kit, it does include the wall adapter, usb cable (mini usb), and hard copy manual. It's worth the extra $20.

John

jaeg

Thanks for your reply.

Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL)

Mike said...
There is some really neat speech synthesis software you can download that synthesizes several voices doing harmony in stereo

From the website:
"Singing Demo (16th Century)

A narrated demo of the Propeller chip singing a 4-part harmony from the 16th century in four voices spatially placed on a virtual sound stage.

This is based on the Singing Demo (16th Century, 4-part Harmony) object that is available on the Propeller Object Exchange."


Try the mp3 file example:
www.parallax.com/Portals/0/Downloads/mm/audio/Singing-Demo.mp3

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Aka: CosmicBob

Leon

Simple speech recognition could be done with several bandpass filters (a few op amps) and comparators, enabling the energy in the various frequency bands to be compared with stored templates for a limited number of utterances. This technique was used many years ago with the TRS-80 and other early home computers to recognise up to 32 words. The system would have to be trained for each individual speaker. It could be implemented in software using an FFT. The Furby used a special chip for speech recognition, one of those could be interfaced to the Propeller, of course.

Leon

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Amateur radio callsign: G1HSM
Suzuki SV1000S motorcycle

jaeg

Is the the board that sticks up on the left side of the Furby?

johnfl68

As I recall - it is the RSC-4128 chip by Sensory:

www.sensoryinc.com/products/RSC-4x_series.html

John

jaeg

Another Question. If I wanted to make the demo board battery powered could I just chop off the end of a wall adapter and wire it to a 9 volt battery plug?

Mike Green

9V batteries don't really have a lot of capacity. You can do it, but it's much better to use AA batteries. RadioShack is a good supplier for this stuff, but other similar vendors would have this. Get a 4 cell AA battery holder and maybe a single AA cell holder as well and wire them in series. RadioShack has various wall-adapter extension cables. Get one of those and the matching plug for the Demo Board. Cut off one end and wire that to the battery holders. Include a switch to select between 4 cells and 5 cells. A 4 cell battery pack is perfect for alkaline batteries and provides 6V. A 5 cell battery pack is perfect for NiMH batteries and also provides 6V (but is rechargable).

jaeg

Thanks for all the help. I plan to do some real cool things with the demo board. I have gutted original and new Furbies that I plan to build H-bridges for to control them via the propeller. I thought it would be cool to try to move my computer Artificial life projects to more physical format amongst other things. I also plan on getting an sd card to integrate with it to give it memory or just make an interactive computer like device with a bunch of sensors.

Thanks again.

jaeg

Could I use this H-bridge to control a motor I got out of a Halloween ornament?

http://www.solarbotics.net/library/circuits/driver_4varHbridge.html

jaeg

Sorry for the bump. Just wanted to say that the circuit worked out fine on my Sumobot's BS2. It uses two pins. If you want it to go one direction the one pin is set to high and the other low. For the other direction you just do the opposite. To stop you either have them both high or low. Since I have extra room on the board I built the circuit on I am going to make pin headers for servos that way all I have to do is plug this board into the Vss and Vin of the Demo Board, plug the motors and the servos inputs in and I'm ready to go! Just for those curious my project has turned into an interactive computer with a head that has a functioning mouth and can tilt up and down and side to side. I have several sensor I am going to try out on it. Look for it in the robotics section once I have more completed!