@mcsdaver has asked me to produce a custom soundcontroller for him (to work with the EZ:B), and I think this may be of interest of other forum members to see how such a custom chipset is actually produced.
So what is a soundcontroller? It is a small microcontroller that is dedicated to producing quality sound. The chip also has a small number of input triggers and outputs to control LEDs and motors etc and has to be coded in assembler. If you have a toy, game or gift product that talks or has sound effects then its very likely to have a soundcontroller.
My favorite soundcontroller is the Winbond W523Sxx this small chip can have up to 60 seconds of quality speech/sound effects, it has 4 trigger (input) lines and 5 output lines (for motors, LEDs , relays etc). The dev board for the W523 which is very small looks like this
I need to know what David wants the soundcontroller to do and hopefully he will do this here so as I build the application anyone interested can see how it all comes together.
So David if you can give me your specification and wave files of the sound effects you want embedded, I will get started.
Tony
Tony, I'm a David but not the one you area asking to answer this thread.
However I do have a question about this cool little gadget. Can it be set to loop a sound file? lets say I have a file that plays a constant sound or sounds for 60 seconds and I want it to play on for ever. Lets say it's spooky ghost and ghoul noises in a Halloween display.
Real neat Tony!
Dave, are you doing what I think you're doing? Halloween EZ-Robot?! Very cool!
Oh it's getting to be that time agian! Halloween robots
Thanks DJ!
Yes Dave it could easily do that. @mcsdaver is another David here on the forum, I hope at some point he puts up the spec that he wants the soundcontroller to do.
I have a idea for a really simple interface with the EZ-B using just 2 lines, this would work well for up to around 20 separate phrases or sound effects. The EZ-B could tell the soundcontroller that number phrase to speak by first bringing one line low (enable) this tells the W523 to expect a pulse train, then the EZ-B sends as many pulses as the utterance number (on the clock line). So if it was phrase 15 it would clock the clock line 15 times. After this the EZ-B then takes the enable line back high which signals to the W523 that the pulse train had ended, and it now needs to output the sound.
I have used the W523Sxx on a lot of the toys, games and gifts that I have licensed over the years. Here are TV adverts of some, in all cases the W523 did all the work, you will see how versatile they are.