Speech in microcontroller

A PIC isn't suitable - not enough storage space. Check out voice recorder chips such as the ISD 2500 series. e.g. ISD2560, or the APR9301. You can then use a PIC to control the voice chip. I bought some ISD2560s from RS electronics a couple of years ago. They're not cheap, but they work reasonably well. ... Johnny

main problem with this is storage.

Pics have only a few K of register storage at absolute best. You would need to do one of two things:

A. forget this and go for a custom vox recorder chip - they are quite good and not terribly expensive.

B. augment the storage on the pic. If you have pre-recorded sounds, you could bung them in an I2C rom and play them back using the D2A of a pic, but again the storage capacity is not great - also, getting the data at a good rate might be an issue. One alternative (that I have used with good results) is to mimic the conventional bus of a CPU and drive the A & D buses from ports and the CS & R/W line from another. this gives you bags of store for eithr RAM or EPROM based sounds at a good speed. If you take this approach, you might find it easier to have a general 8 bit bus (say) and you can use this for other things as well by correctly setting the control of the peripheral chips so they play nice - i.e. if you have an LCD display, it can share the 8 bit bus with your EPROM (and anything else) by just making sure you don't leave them with outputs active when not in use.

My application (a 4Mb augment for data capture) used an eight bit bus and a load of latches to set the addresses and the same bus for data transfer from keypad, LCD & RAM. It doesn't use a lot of port bits, and I think 2 full 8 bit ports did everything... (think so ... could be wrong it was a while back)

Johnny's got a great idea. The ISD "Chipcorder" ICs are perfect with a PIC. ISD was bought out by Winbond. If you can read a datasheet, you can make it happen.

These ICs are sold by DigiKey, among others. Just pick out the one you want based on your recording/playback time needs.

A little pricey, but well worth it if you just want to git r done. You could do worse than start out with the ISD4003.

Good luck Chris

even

able

APR9301.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Chris. My project was an animated, trailer-mounted, model of a waste recycling facility for a local council, with the purpose of educating school-kids. The model was divided into 8 sections, with a small control panel and a pushbutton related to each section. When a button was pressed, the relevant section would come into action, with a short narration. I built this in association with a local sculptor, who built the basic lanscape. We had stuff like miniature conveyors loading trucks, a garbage compactor that moved backwards and forwards, LED-lit pipelines that gave the impression of liduid movement in the required direction, etc. It was a fun project. ... Johnny

It might have been cost effective to buy 8 of those voice / picture frames from Radio Shack and use those. Zero development time.

pic it self does not have enough storage for that how ever, you can use an external Serial Eprom and use the pic to access the address points.

--
Real Programmers Do things like this.
http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5

council,

No Radio Shack here. Still, "voice / picture frames", never heard of them. How long have they been available? Something like that would have cut the development time of the audio section. Can they store 60 seconds of speech? ... Johnny

Display your precious moments in style. Preserve memories with both a photograph and a recorded message! Leather-like frame holds two 5x7" photographs and complements any decor. Plus, you can record two 5-second recordings for each photo. To play back the messages, simply touch the photo. Holds two 5x7" photographs Voice recorder saves two 5-second messages for each photo Play back messages by touching the picture AAA Batteries (4)

them.

the

Wouldn't have done what I wanted, but interesting nonetheless. Also, I guess I shouldn't have said "No Radio Shack here", now that we have this newfangled thing called the web.

... Johnny

It depends on where 'here' is. Although the Shack has been subsumed by other companies outside of the USA the old name is still often used.

other

"Here" is Australia. They might well exist somewhere in this country, but not where I'm living, on the South Coast of NSW. ... Johnny

Dick Smiths?

No.

Here in Canada, there was a division of Radio Shack starting about

1970. About twenty years ago, that was spun off into a standalone company. But it had the right to use the Radio Shack name, and sell the products.

Then a few years ago, the company here was bought by Circuit City. They ran it for a while, but Radio Shack in the US didn't like that, given that Circuit City is a competitor down there. It took CIrcuit City to court, and won, so Circuit CIty could no longer be Radio Shack in Canada.

Circuit CIty rebrands the stores "The Source" and clears out the items with Radio Shack or the RS house names on it. Which actually was easier given that they had been coming out with their own brands here in Canada for a while, and had added well known brands to the flyers and catalogs.

But since the locals stores haven't generally changed location, we can still shop at stores that used to be Radio Shacks, and thus it's easy to refer to them as Radio Shacks out of habit.

On the other hand, with nobody using the name "Radio Shack" here in Canada, the field is open for Radio Shack to move in. ANd while it's not clear how things are going, they've done that, opening a few stores in the Toronto area.

Kind of like almost forty years ago, when Radio Shack made its first entrance into Canada with a handful of stores, in the Toronto area.

Michael

I'm not going to call it "The Source by Circuit City". Same stores, same staff, almost the same products.

but

Yeah, there's a local Dick Smith franchisee here. They might stock these things. Still, the project was completed several years ago, probably before they were made. Also, to get the required 8 x 60 seconds, I would have needed to buy 48 of them, pull them apart and link them together in groups of 6. US$10 equates to about AU$13.30, so the cost would have been about AU$640. I think, from memory, that the ISD chips cost me less at the time and were easy to use, with reasonable quality sound. ... Johnny

No, if you want more than 5 seconds don't use these. I'm sure you can get what you want from a dealer in Sydney or Melbourne.

I don't want anything - I was describing an old project that I completed years ago ... Johnny

Digikey have a complete text-to-speech chip, the WTS701 by Winbond:

?Ref=10913&Site=US&Cat=32572627

Dave :)