Digi-sign Record Made Easy

Digi sign record

this is digi talker and jinko j e 520 welcome previously i've done speech synthesizer projects based on the general instruments spo sp0256 and on the votrax sc01a this week i'm going to do one on the digi talker i've already got my board here i'm going to go through the design of it and talk about some of the unique things about this chip and near the end of the video i'm going to go through all of the available rom images that i have managed to get my hands on and play the speech from all of them so that you can hear what the digi talker chipset is capable of producing now one of the digi talker chipset sellers i encountered was george out in the netherlands and george was kind enough to send me not only the ssr-1 and srsr2 images for the digi talker chipset but also the national semiconductor data sheets and application notes so let's start by taking a look at the data sheet for the chip then we'll figure out how we can interface it so the digi-talker is speech synthesis system it's actually multiple chips you need both the digi talker ic itself as well as the speech roms to go with it and it is based on digitized speech so the digi talker differs from speech synthesizers like the spo spo-256 or the votrax sc01 those ones you build words by stringing together basic building blocks of speech called phonemes with the digi talker each word is digitized in its entirety and it is digitized and coded using a custom algorithm developed by forrest moser and this algorithm it compresses the speech down so it can be fit on a rom so one of the natural consequences of this is that you have a very limited set of vocabulary you can only say the words that exist in the rom itself so here's this picture of how the speech synthesizer would typically be used you've got eight bits of input going to select the word that gives you 256 possible words now it's usually not the case that the rom includes 256 words because the rom is just not that big so usually there seems to be about 100 to 150 or so but anyway you select your word with those eight digital inputs and then you pulse a right bit and that will tell it to speak that particular word after it's done speaking the word it generates an in interrupt and that interrupt will tell your microcontroller that you can load the next word speech comes out from a digital pin and goes into a filtering system and an amplifier so let's see there's uh here's a picture of the filter circuit you've got an op amp an rc filter audio decoupling capacitor and then you go into some kind of an amplifier simple enough to interface you can actually interface this ship without even using a microprocessor you could just connect switches to it and make it speak words all by itself just kind of neat and if you look through application notes there will actually be a few applications where people have done something like a rom chip that stores uh several words in sequence to be able to make it speak sentences and sequence to be a ttl logic so that you can make something talk without actually having a microprocessor maybe that was important back in the day when microprocessors were more expensive and microcontrollers were fairly not uncommon now as i said the vocabulary is limited to what it comes with the various national semiconductor roms now the chipset would typically include the ssr1 and ssr2 roms which would include this list of words so you've got a lot of digits you've got letters some tones and then some common words now there was also an ssr5 and ssr six rom that included an expanded word set you would add this to the basic one and then you could say these additional words so for example the ssr 5 and 6 had useful things like abort or forward or incorrect or intruder you could imagine making a alarm system out of this you know intruder or smoke room lots of useful stuff in here unfortunately i do not have a copy of the ssr 5 and 6 roms i've kind of looked around i can't find them i assume somebody has them someplace but these things become hard to find if you do have um the ssr five and six rom images i would love it if someone would share one with me so that i could complete my set but i will probably keep looking for them now jonathan gevari who is one person i found on the net who was quite helpful and has several rom images and he was kind enough to share them with me so here is a list of all of the roms that are in my personal possession now just because i have these rom images does not mean i can necessarily distribute these they were given to me by jonathan and i told him it was for my personal use it was not for giving out to others on the internet if i was to redistribute them i would probably have to clear it through him and then he may in turn have to recursively clear it through other people who may have given him some of the images you know we don't want to take anything that anyone went to a bunch of effort to get these decoded out of some piece of equipment and give it away without their permission and there's also a concern that um the companies that produce these devices might have active copyright claims and might consider this their valued intellectual property so maybe going back to the original companies and asking them would be nice before dumping these images on the internet i'll have to think about it i'll have to ask around a little bit but this is what i have managed to come across and these are the things that i know currently exist because you know i actually have them so first off we have the ssr1 and ssr2 roms out of the national instrument digi talker kit those ones are described in the data sheet ssr 5 and ssr 6 are also described in the data sheet but i don't have them i would very much like to get my hands on them i assume somebody someplace has them because they did exist but i don't know who would je520 was a kit sold by jameco electronics and there were a total of four roms from it genesis is an alarm panel has various words like burglar and intruder and various alarm sensor related words is talking alarm panel of some sort sensophone and also a duo phone where devices um sold for monitoring either a home or a business and you could call into this thing or the phone it would tell you the temperature and it would let you listen to the room stuff like that so kind of a talking home monitoring thing the duo phone variant was sold by radio shack i'm assuming the sense of phone i'm not sure who sold that and then scorpion is i think it's a pinball or arcade game at the tail end of this video i will actually play these from the digi-talker so you can hear what these things sounded like in their various devices okay let's walk through this schematic one section at a time starting up here at the upper left i have a boost converter and the reason for this is because the digi talker chipset requires more than five volt if you watch my previous video on my votrax project then you'll notice i did the same sort of thing there where it was more convenient to run the board off a single five volt supply than both the higher and a lower voltage supply so i used a boost converter this three pin header is for a polyloo boost converter that converts 5 volts on up to 9 volts i built in some footprints for some fuses because especially with my vintage projects i like to be very cautious about something going wrong and damaging the vintage ic so there are fuses on both the 5 volt and 12 volt supplies there are also tvs diodes that would catch any screw ups or power surges next down here we have the microcontroller i used an atmega at328 something that i've been using in a lot of my projects it's just a good microcontroller easy to program with a lot of digital i os got a couple headers for it here this header is for in-circuit programming so that we can program it without having to pull the chip and this here is an i squared c header that i can use to connect this board to some of my other projects typically i would do that with like one of my raspberry pi projects for example next up we have a couple of other options for controlling the speech synthesizer down here i put an esp8266 header for an esp-01 board esp8266 is a great little wi-fi chipset and it can be interfaced over transmit and receive lines so you can talk to it over serial very simply i also included a small 3.3 volt power supply for the esp8266 since it is a 3.3 volt device now up here we have the third potential way to control this which is to control it via a good old 25 pin or nine pin serial connector so just like the olden days if you were to have something like a votrax type and talk or something like that it would have a big old 25-pin serial connectors also here is a six-pin header that fits a popular ftdi breakout cable so you could use any of the number of widely available ftdi um usb to serial cables and plug it in here and be able to plug this into your modern computer that way next let's talk about the speech synthesizer so here we have the digi talker chip and i've wired it up to the microcontroller in sort of the obvious way which is the eight data bits that select the word go into eight lines in the microcontroller we also have coming out here a chip select and then we have a right pin which connects to the microcontroller we have a cms there is an interrupt pin which is how the digi talker lets the microcontroller know that it's ready for a new word there's a pin here where the digital speech comes out and it'll run into this filter section that we'll describe in a moment and then there is over here where the digi talker interfaces to an external memory ic so the digi talker does not store the speech internally you always have to have this external rom and like most roms it's the interface via a set of address lines and a set of data lines in this case i chose to use a 39 sf040 which can store 512 kilobytes of data typical digi talker chipset is like 16k so you could represent many sets of words in this and as you can see i broke out the extra pins total of four of them broken out with pads connect them to the microcontroller now let's talk about this filtering and amplification section so the speech comes out here and then the data sheet calls for it to go through an op-amp so used in lm358n powered by the same nine-volt supply as the digi-talker and then we get to this little bit of oddness here which is filtering on the output now the datasheet calls for a simple uh resistor capacitor filter potentiometer i found this on one of the schematics when i was looking up other people's designs i found this on a page called a fox consulting and design and the author of that project chose to put a potentiometer here now maybe he was thinking that he could make the output filter tunable i'm not really sure i should probably ask him why he did it but it seemed like it couldn't hurt so i did the same thing rather than using a fixed resistor there i put in potentiometer so we come out of the op amp we go through a resistor and capacitor that is our filter this here is a zero ohm um resistor and then we go into this pot which is our volume control now you notice there's some components here marked no populate no populate there and there a 0 ohm resistor here no populate resistor there so the reason for all of these no populate and wired across components is just that i have tried to use a similar filtering circuit in several of my speech projects and left lots of blank footprints in so the guy could experiment around with it because different data sheets call for different things but for doing it the digi-talker way you pretty much go through the op-amp through the filter into the volume control out through this audio decoupling capacitor and then we go into an amplifier now i chose just like i did with my votrex board i chose to use a tpa 2016 that is a module you can get at adafruit and it is controllable via i squared c so the nice thing about that is that we could leave these potentiometers here fixed and we could do volume control in software and that can be really nice when controlling this board from a computer having a software volume control here is a quick look at the pc boards up here we have the pololu boost converter five volts nine volt with a couple of capacitors a couple fuses and some tvs diodes we have the atmega at328 microcontroller we have the max 202 level converter as well as the db25 serial port um i believe right here is the header for the ftdi cable if you wanted to use that instead i've got the icsp port for the atmega and i've got the i squared c here for it if you want to use the esp8266 it would plug in right there we have the digi talker ics here's the big digi talker ic here's the 39 sf040 external rom speech comes out goes into the op amp and into the adafruit tpa 2016 amplifier and then i have it going into this rather small speaker so as you can see pretty straight forward board okay now it's time for a quick demo i have the board hooked up to a raspberry pi you can see i've got four wires connecting it this would be a plus five volt ground uh the sda and scl so it's hooked up via the i squared c bus and then it will be emitting sound on its little speaker here so i've written myself a python program that can talk to my board over i squared c or serial or the esp8266 let's take a look at this vocab dot py file so in this file i listed the entire vocabulary of all of the roms i have it's indexed by rom number as well as word number so for example the word were came from um rom bank number three and it was word 123. if we go and find something like supervisory i know that came from the alarm panel uh super advisory was alarm or was uh bank number five word number 79 uh the phrase this is digi talker uh that is from the ssr-1 rom and it's uh you know bank zero and word number zero so i can tell my tools is just say these words i called my tool digicontrol and i'll tell it to say this is digi talker uh then insert 160 millisecond pause and then say and jameco je520 so that will use two different roms uh the national semiconductor ssr one and two and then the je520 because you know the word chainco is in there so let me go ahead and push this this is digital and jingle j e5 so let's try a couple more words let's do like intruder intruder burglar that was out of the genesis alarm panel and some of these you'll notice they're actual phrases so like the sensophone word number 81 was the entire phrase uh warning message received by telephone number so let me um say that entire phrase let's see what it sounds like warning message received by telephone number okay so that's kind of how the program i wrote to do this work so i can certainly easily interface this to a raspberry pi as i've done here i could put it in my hero junior robot rebuild if i wanted to i think i kind of like the votrax better for that project but this is an option well i hope you've enjoyed this video and this exploration of the digi-talker speech synthesizer always wanted one of these back in the day i'd see it in the electronics catalogs which is something i never managed to get fortunately ebay together with some very helpful hobbyists have allowed me to own one in 2021 i am going to come up with a project for this and i'll probably do a second video i'm thinking hooking up some displays and encoder to it so i could be able to flip through the words and make it say various words maybe build myself a homemade speaking spell for my daughter i think that would be a cool project if you have any good project ideas something i could build please let me know and i will try to build it so finally for the remainder of this video uh just because i have these roms with all of these words i'm going to tell the speech synthesizer to say every word uh that i have in the vocabulary this is digital one 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 000 million 0 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z again ampere and check comma control danger degree dollar down equal error feet flow fuel gallon go gram great greater have high higher hour in inches is it killer left less lesser limit low lower mark meter mile mill minus minute near number of off on out over parenthesis percent please plus point pound pulses rate re ready right second set space speed start start stop plan huh time try up fault wait jingle space attention thank you number dollar percent open close time plus or minus point divide 0 1 2 3 4 five six seven eight nine nine continue less equal great help at a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u g w x y z 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 after again all and away back bar in before between black blue break brown by cancel caution sent change check clear command complete condition control correct cost cross cursor cyan dart data date decrease delete device did disk display don't door down drive and enter error escape exit fail fast fire first forward from fuel function get go good goodbye green gray have hello here hi hit power 100 if in increase insert use it joystick key last left level right limit listen load low magenta million minute miss more move my next no normal now o'clock of off okay on orange other out over phone place play please press program range read ready record red repeat reverse right room run save second select send set shift should sign slow speed spell start stop system tape target test then that the then there this thousand total try turn type up use violet voice wait was where welcome what white will with word yellow yes your 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z access alarm alert all and area armed attention attic back basement bath battery bed bell box building burglar button call case caution change check child circuit close code code computer condition conference control current customer day delay dam department detector dining disarm display door down east emergency entry equipment exit exterior failure family fan feature fire first floor from front function garage gas glass gun hallway help high hold our house in instant interior intruder is key keypad kitchen large left level right living lobby lock lounge main master memory knight north not number off on open or out over hand panic pass personnel premises repair right room synth screen second secure security select sensor service ship show side sky smoke south spare stair storage store supervisory switch system temperature test third tone trouble up utility waiting warning water near west window wing work zone zero one 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100. oh am pm again attention hello this is sansa phone unit the time is the temperature is decreased the electricity is sound level alert condition battery condition listen to the sound level for 15 seconds have a good day indicate you have received warning message by dialing within 30 seconds off high low okay clear enter entry error no number number limit high temperature low temperature limit this is telephone number please leave a message replace batteries exists alert conditions warning message received by telephone number this is saxophone system test okay again all attention button circuit complete error are fifth first forward four fuel go great greater is lesser level low next of on please press right second start thank top third try u zone s thank you for watching my video please visit my website at www.smbaker.com for more electronics projects and sand rail stuff bye