The folks at the Louisville hackerspace LVL1 now have a fabulous piece of wall art that is also a speech synthesizer. The speech synthesizer is over two feet long and is made of nine panels of stripboard connected with right angle headers. An awesome piece of art if there ever was one.
This speech synthesizer is actually 30 years in the making. In the early 1980s, one of the members of LVL1 across a few text-to-speech ICs in a bin in Radio Shack. These ICs sat in a drawer while college got in the way, and in 1990, the project was resurrected. The speech synth chips sat in a drawer for another decade, and it was finally decided to build a wall-mounted speech synth for LVL1.
This speech synthesizer is intended to be the voice box for FATHER, LVL1’s second hackerspace AI. Already the first AI – MOTHER – is already telling people to take out the trash and generally trying to become the AI-gone-amok we all deserve. FATHER will be implemented in a robotic monkey, so right now the only question we have is who has been messing with the Louisville water supply.
I got one of those synth speech chips from a Radio Shack closeout bin too! (Probably the same time they got theirs) So, I guess it is time to start building mine…
Just don’t give it control of the self-destruct system in your commercial space tug.
I think you accidentally a word
Oh the good old SPO256! No geek are complete without one. 😉
I have used the SPO256 to build a speech synth for the Commodore 64 and also an “instrument” for electronic music https://sites.google.com/site/mjrippe/vocal-tractor
Fritz? Is that hand-wiring auto-router or something? Googling yields way too many other Fritzs.
Okay, a lucky typo and google predictive search lead me to fritzing.org. Interesting.
6ythergherg