We all love the Arduino, but does the Arduino love us back? There used to be a time when the Arduino couldn’t express it’s deepest emotions, but now that [Nick] hooked up a speech synthesis chip from a Speak & Spell, it can finally whisper sweet robotic nothings to us.

The original 1980s Speak & Spell contained a fabulously high-tech speech synthesizer from Texas Instruments. This innovative chip predated [Stephen Hawking]‘s voice and went on to be featured in the numerous speech add-ons for 80s microcomputers like the Apple II, BBC Micro, and a number of Atari arcade games.

[Nick] has been working on his Speak & Spell project for several months now, and he’s getting around to testing the PCBs he made. By his own admission, connecting an Arduino to a Speak & Spell is a little difficult, but he’s got a few tricks up his sleeve to get around the limitations of the hardware. The final goal of [Nick]‘s project is a MIDI-controllable Speak & Sound speech synth for the Arduino. This has been done before, but never from a reverse-engineered Speak & Spell.

You can check out [Nick]‘s progress in interfacing the Speak & Spell speech chip after the break. There’s still work to do, but it’s still very impressive.

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The V-USB library is a pretty handy piece of code that lets you add USB connectivity to ATtiny microcontrollers (it was previously named tinyUSB). But if you’ve ever looked into adding the library to your own projects you may have been stymied by the complexity of the code. There are many examples, but there’s a lack of a concise quick-start for the uninitiated. [Joonas Pihlajamaa] has been working to correct that shortfall with his four-part V-USB tutorial series. It’s not for the absolute newbie; you should already be comfortable working with AVR chips but that’s the only real prerequisite we can see.

He starts the series with a look into the hardware considerations. USB provides a 5V power rail but the data lines expect 3.3V logic so this must be accounted for. With the test rig built on a breadboard he moves on to pick apart the code, covering various user-defined variables that you’ll need to set based on your project’s needs. We’re going to keep this on the back burner and hopefully the Troll Sniffing Rat will get a makeover (although we must say comments have been a lot nicer as of late… keep it up!).

We’ve embedded links to all four tutorial parts after the break.

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[Navic] added a slew of abilities to his RFID reader. It’s now a full-featured RFID reader and smart card writer with extras. When we looked at it last time the unit was just an RFID and smart card reader in a project enclosure. You could see the RFID code of a tag displayed on the LCD screen, but there wasn’t a lot more to it than that.

The upgrade uses the same project enclosure but he’s added four buttons below the display. These allow him to access the different features that he’s implemented. The first one, which is shown in the video after the break, allows him to store up to six tags in the EEPROM of the Basic Stamp which drives the unit. He can dump these tag codes to a smart card (pictured above), but also has the option of interfacing with a PC to read from and write to that card.

We don’t think you can directly write RFID tags with the device, but we could be wrong.

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Although there are several vertical axis wind turbines listed on greenterrafirma’s page, the one built with 55 gallon drums was especially interesting to us.  Although the spouse approval factor of any of these designs is debatable, at $100, the 55 gallon drum design could provide a very good return on investment.  The tools required to make one of these are relatively simple, so this could make this experiment accessible to those without a vast arsenal of equipment.

If large blue barrels aren’t your thing, the post also features several other turbine designs, including one made with wood and aluminium foil, and one constructed out of PVC pipe.  The video after the break does a good job of explaining the “blue barrel” construction process, but if you’d rather just see this [VAWT] in action, fast forward to 5:25.

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Function generators are a handy bench tool to have around, and while you can usually cobble something together that works, it is much more handy to grab a device when you need it. Thats where this function generator sent to us by [Mohonri]comes in. Based around a ATTiny25 and a rail to rail op amp which is able to replicate frequencies from 1Hz to about 40KHz, in square, triangle, and sinewaves simultaneously.

The function generator also features independent amplitude control on each output. And it’s all on one palm-sized, single-sided PCB. The main part of the code is split into two parts: the main loop gets the inputs and constructs a waveform table in SRAM, and then an ISR reads that table and outputs it to one of the timers, which produces a PWM output, which is low-pass-filtered and then passes through a potentiometer (for amplitude control) and then to an op-amp before landing on a set of terminals.

Though its not 100% perfect, trading speed for a 6 bit resolution, it should be more than enough for most electronic projects. You can pick it up in kit form from the on-line shop, but schematics, software and PCB layouts are also available for download.

Two  months ago we featured a transceiver based on the Microchip MRF49XA, and a lot of feedback was sent to [hpux735] requesting that some brains be added onto the system. [hpux735] decided that if he was going to do it, might as well go the distance and make a make a native USB transceiver.

The prototype model is designed for use with the Atmel AT90USBKey, and uses the LUFA USB framework. The protocol and packet format was revised, and a Hamming Code implementation was built using look-up tables to give error control. Finally once the prototype was ready to go [hpux735] created some awesome little PCB’s that contain the AVR, radio, antenna hookups, and blinky lights (no project is complete without blinky lights) are all ready to go when you are.

This project has come quite a long way, covers 3 blog pages, uses a fair bit of ribbon cable, but you just got to love when a plan comes together.

Most useless machine

We love ‘em, and we hope you do too. Here’s [Phase2plus'] take on the most useless machine.

Scratching like it’s 1989

[Nick] spent three bucks at the thrift store and ended up buying days worth of fun with this cassette player. He hacked it to scratch like vinyl.

3D printed jawbone

This lady now has her own 3D-printed jawbone. We’re not talking about the Bluetooth headset… it’s an actual bone replacement! And yes, the skeleton for the Terminator was 3D printed… we’re that much closer now. [Thanks Steve]

Hexbug superbowl

Why not let robots decide our sports gambling choices? [Eric] let this slew of HexBugs battle it out as an early indicator for who would win the Super Bowl. Seems he has no shortage of the little toys, all of which received an MSP430 upgrade. The firmware actually implements obstacle avoidance, but he makes a poke at the Chicago Bears who seem to have the same mission.

Foil fix for worn out remotes

[Viktor] found an interesting repair tip. If you’ve got remote controlers whose buttons are not working so well anymore you may be able to fix them with tin foil. He uses a single-hole punch to clip out circles which are attached to the underside of the misbehaving button. Worth a try!

To us it makes a lot of sense to hold the tablet in one hand and type with the other. That’s exactly how [Adam Kumpf] has implemented this one-handed typing interface which was originally conceived by [Doug Engelbart].

As you can see, there’s a large contextual area for each finger on your right hand. Letters and navigational keystrokes are input through this interface based on single touches, or combinations up to and including all five digits. This offers up 32 possible combinations (including all on and all off) which is enough to cover the modern English alphabet.

[Adam's] demo page works for most tablets so give it a whirl. Yes, it works with iDevices too which is a surprise as we would have thought this was using Flash. If you’re not near a touch-sensitive device you can get the gist of the operation from the demo video embedded after the break.

Now, who’s going to be the first to make this into a replacement keyboard on iOS 5?

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