SX28 featured in December 2007 SERVO magazine. SC-01 to SpeakJet translator...
RobotWorkshop
Posts: 2,307
Hello Everyone,
I thought some of you might like to know that the SX28 chip was just featured in a new article. The project made the cover on the December 2007 issue of SERVO!
www.servomagazine.com/
It is used as a translator which makes a SpeakJet chip emulate an old SC-01 speech chip. It handles the parallel to serial conversion, handshaking (on both sides), and phoneme translation. It was a fun project and was done since the SC-01 is no longer produced. Besides acting as just an optional replacement for the SC-01, some of the extra features of the SpeakJet chip were leveraged to allow the robot to Sound like R2D2 whenever he speaks, if desired.
This can eventually be shrunk down to a small DIP hybrid module which will fit in place of the SC-01. For those that have been following the SX forums you may have seen the SX48 40-pin DIP module I made as a kit.
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=654295
That was a project that I made to get familiar with making hybrid DIP modules and use what I learned to eventually shrink the whole SC-01 translator onto a similar DIP module.
I feel that this was an excellent practical application of the SX28 chip. Although the Propeller chip is a fantastic chip, the SX series was a much better choice for this particular application. The reasons that I chose the SX28 over the Prop: Small package style of the surface mount SX28, lower cost of the SX28, No external EEPROM required, and the most important was that the SX series chips were ready to start executing immediately while the prop had a latency when starting while reading it's external EEPROM. I'd certainly use the Prop for other projects but I brought this up to illustrate how important it is to match the processor with the project.
For those of you who do read the article I hope you enjoy it!
Best Regards,
Robert
www.robotworkshop.com
I thought some of you might like to know that the SX28 chip was just featured in a new article. The project made the cover on the December 2007 issue of SERVO!
www.servomagazine.com/
It is used as a translator which makes a SpeakJet chip emulate an old SC-01 speech chip. It handles the parallel to serial conversion, handshaking (on both sides), and phoneme translation. It was a fun project and was done since the SC-01 is no longer produced. Besides acting as just an optional replacement for the SC-01, some of the extra features of the SpeakJet chip were leveraged to allow the robot to Sound like R2D2 whenever he speaks, if desired.
This can eventually be shrunk down to a small DIP hybrid module which will fit in place of the SC-01. For those that have been following the SX forums you may have seen the SX48 40-pin DIP module I made as a kit.
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=654295
That was a project that I made to get familiar with making hybrid DIP modules and use what I learned to eventually shrink the whole SC-01 translator onto a similar DIP module.
I feel that this was an excellent practical application of the SX28 chip. Although the Propeller chip is a fantastic chip, the SX series was a much better choice for this particular application. The reasons that I chose the SX28 over the Prop: Small package style of the surface mount SX28, lower cost of the SX28, No external EEPROM required, and the most important was that the SX series chips were ready to start executing immediately while the prop had a latency when starting while reading it's external EEPROM. I'd certainly use the Prop for other projects but I brought this up to illustrate how important it is to match the processor with the project.
For those of you who do read the article I hope you enjoy it!
Best Regards,
Robert
www.robotworkshop.com
Comments
The SX would certainly be a great choice to add serial support to any older chips like the SPO256-AL2. I would expect that it should be fairly straightforward to get it wired up. It just needs to handle the serial to parallel conversion and the handshaking. You're already the expert on receiving the Serial characters in the background (and I thank you for that as it has helped me in other projects) the rest should be easy. Since you won't need to do any phoneme translation i'd expect the code to be pretty short.
Now, if you find any extra TMS5220 speech chips or old R6511Q chips in your parts drawer let me know... I can still use some extras of those to finish some other projects...
Best Regards,
Robert
Wow you made the cover!
I'm always glad to see the SX get exposure. Thanks for the article. I'll have to get that edition.
Bean
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www.iElectronicDesigns.com
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I'll hafta git the magazine and see how true the emulation is because the SC-01 has, not
just the 8-bit parallel port for phoneme input but, I believe 3-bits in addition for prosodics
manipulation (just selected one of eight pitch values). Still, I think the SpeakJet will sound
BETTER than the old SC-01. I hand-wired a board with the SC-01 for my TRaSh-80 Model 1!
Actually, I am serious about having an SC-01 -- it cost about $70 from MicroMint at the time --
and I still have it. I always used sockets for my IC's -- especially the $70, static-sensitive CMOS
variety!
Robert, you can probably pull some 5220's out of later versions of the TI-99/4a speech
synthesizer modules. They were probably made of the off-white plastic that the later
model 4a's were eventually made of. I believe only that version of the Speech Module
had 5220's in them -- the others had 5200's in them.
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-Rusty-
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Rusty Haddock = AE5AE = rusty@fe2o3.lonestar.org
**Out yonder in the Van Alstyne (TX) Metropolitan Area**
Microsoft is to software what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
I believe that Radio Shack used the SC-01 in there own Speech Synthesizer (Big silver box) for the Model I. It made it into a lot of devices like that. My old one is probably still stashed somewhere over at my parents place. That Radio Shack box had a really weird interface where it would scan screen memory for certain characters printed at the lower right hand side of the screen. But that is somewhat off the subject....
The SC-01 just had 64 phonemes (6-bits of data) and two extra bits for inflection. The translator program does use the inflection and it does improve the translation. The emulation isn't 100% perfect but overall it has been doing a very good job and on most things that HERO says. With every revision of the code the translation gets better and many times you can't tell the difference. If I needed another SC-01 chip this setup would do the job. The fact that it adds a few extras like use a different translation table on the fly (by switching a DIP switch or under external control) to speak like R2D2 instead was a bonus. My son liked the way it sounded when speaking like R2. I haven't tried it in other devices which used the SC-01 but I expect that it would work for most. The one feature I didn't implement is to use the ADC to read an external control that is typically used to set the overall pitch (clock speed) of the original SC-01. On the HERO that control is typically set and left there. This just matches what I normally have them talk like. It should be possible to add a bit of code to check the ADC and then adjust the overall speed for a more accurate emulation. In my case that particular setting didn't matter so it was left for a future version.
For the most part the SC-01 has been a pretty robust chip. I haven't had to replace many of them. The one I did have to replace were due to someone connecting batteries in backwards or the used a pair of 12v batteries instead of two 6v batteries in series. Ouch! Besides using something like this for repairs I can also use them for new robots and keep all the original programs which sends out SC-01 codes.
The later SC-02 (SSI 263) used more bits and had more features. Perhaps that it the chip your thinking of.
I've pulled a couple 5220's out of the older TI-99/4a speech modules and they do work. It just takes a bit to unsolder them. I haven't tried any from the newer gray/beige ones. If I come across one i'll have to try one. Those are for a different robot though.
If you try it with your TRS-80 i'd like to hear how it works out.
Best Regards,
Robert
http://flmsdown.net/2007/12/02/servo_december_2007.html