The Maker Faire was excellent, even if there was a significant hardware failure that took the phone off-line for part of Saturday and all of Sunday. It was too noisy to even attempt to play Zork, so I had prepared the framework so it could run a much simpler game called Moonglow, written by Dave Bernazzani […]
I’ll be exhibiting the phone at the Maker Faire! I don’t know if it’ll be playable in the noisy environment, but I’m working on ways to mitigate that.
This is the first demo of the phone more-of-less complete. Â You can see a video over at my facebook page. Â Apologies for those who don’t use facebook, but the raw video is too big for wordpress to handle. After the demo, I decided that it was time to tear the phone apart and try interfacing […]
So, after a several month hiatus, I’m back at it. Â I managed to get all the parts into the phone, though to make room I had to remove the bells from the ringer mechanism, which makes me sad. You’ll notice the USB cord hanging out the back: that’s for charging the on-board 1,100 mAh LiPoly […]
So it turns out that the transformer wasn’t necessary. Â I broke out a pocket oscilloscope, and it boosted the voltage from 1.5V pp, to 7.5V pp, and the resulting volume in the earpiece was VERY LOUD, so I tried without the transformer, and it worked perfectly, and at a much more reasonable volume with the […]
This is a new, mobile friendly theme, but not everything translated properly. Â I beg your forbearance while I make it look reasonable again.
Thanks to an impedance matching transformer from Radio Shack, I can now play audio though the handset. Yay! It still needs to be a little more polished, but the basic concept works. it_speaks.mov
Here is a mostly complete list of offline text-to-speech engines I have at my disposal.  I have cleaned up the text somewhat from the last time, so they should be easier to understand.  Let me know what your favorite is in the comments. Espeak is a very robotic, but relatively lightweight engine: Festival is a quirky, […]
I’ve got two competing TTS (text-to-speech) engines right now, espeak and festival. Â Each will require some tweaking, but here is a very short game fed through each. Festival: Espeak: Let me know what you think in the comments
Wow, it really has been a while, but improvements in technology have given me an idea of how to improve upon the original Dial-a-Grue phone. The idea is to use a small embedded computer, this time a $9 “chip” computer and actually embed it into a gutted phone.  From there I can use text-to-speech (tts) and […]