Lunch-in-Learn Intro to Ant-Scale Robotics and PICAXE Programming

Some friends at work are getting together for about a month's work of weekly lunch-in-learn meetings to get everyone up to speed on building and programming an ant-scale robot. Then we plant to have a nice competition involving robotic soccer, an Olympics and an autonomous event.

Details [Link]

My other stuff (kayaking, plant identification, etc.) [Link]

"Hotter/Colder" Talking Temp Sensor

This builds on my previous 'Phrasealator' blog by having a PICAXE microcontroller control the SpeakJet voice synthesizer without a PC. I wanted to get familiar with I2C, a serial inter integrated circuit serial protocol commonly used so microprocessors can read data from any sensor 'on the I2C bus'. The sensor I used was TMP102, a Texas Instruments temperature sensor (available from SparkFun). It is a low power device, the whole circuit (excluding the amplified speakers) drew only 3mA. The basic code was less than 40 lines. In operation, the system compares the current temperature measurement to the last one, and if it has changed over a degree, it speaks either "hotter" or "colder". I used the free SpeakJet Phrasealator application to generate a phoenetic string, which I cut and pasted into my basic code. Its dictionary contained the word "hot", to which I added "AXRR" to get the 'ger' of "hotter".

hotter  \HE\OH\TT\AXRR = (20,96,21,114,22,88,23,5,6,183,136,191,151)

Video [Link]

Circuit Diagram [Link]

Basic Code [Link]

SparkFun [Link]

Parts List [Link]

My other interests (Kayaking, plant identification, etc.) [Link]

Phrasealator Speech Synthesizer

In this blog, I add a Maz232 serial interface chip to the SpeakJet IC so it may be controlled by a computer. The application (available on SparkFun) is the Phrasealator speech editor. It has a library of 1400 words, sound effects, DTMF and the phonetics to create any words not in the dictionary. This SW also lets you export the code to cut and paste in your favorite microprocessor (like the PICAXE).

Video of project [Link]

SparkFun [Link]

Magnavision [Link]

My other stuff (kayaking, etc.) [Link]

SpeakJet Voice Synthesizer Demo

I am playing around with the SpeakJet chip to give a future robot a voice. In this video, I am just checking it out in demo mode; which runs through all of the pre-programmed phonics. The chip is made by Magnavision and is available through SparkFun.

Video [Link]

Magnavision [Link]

SparkFun [Link]