A Fox Consulting & Design

DigiTalker Interface Board


DigiTalker is a voice synthesis system National Semiconductor came out with in the late 70's as a solution to encorpirate clear speech into embedded appliances. The standard vocabulary kit came with 144 pre-loaded words that can be sequenced and arranged to make basic sentences. And, it sounds really good even by today's standards, but for one reason or another the product never really took off and National discontinued the DigiTalker line somewhere around 1990.

We picked up this chipset back in the early 90's for about $25 from Jameco Electronics. And, one of our long-term goals has been to make this chipset easily accessible to modern-day microcontrollers

We've had this chipset breadboarded for years and finally decided to make it into a professional product... and here it is!

The board uses a mix of direct control lines and an I2C interface to access the DigiTalker's various address and control lines. A total of 5 Arduino I/O lines are required to operate the DigiTalker. On-board amplifier with adjustable volume and pitch filter are included. The board is designed to run off of a +9DVC power supply.

"This is DigiTalker. One. Two. Three..."


(Schematic)

QtySchematic Part NumberDescription
1C122pf
1C250pf
3C3, C433uf, Polarized
11C5, C6, C7, C9, C10, C11, C12, C13, C14, C16, C19.1uf
1C8100uf, Polarized
1C9.1uf
1C150.47uf, Polarized
1D1LED - Yellow
1D2LED - Green
1J11x8 Header, Female/Male
4J2, J3, J4, J51x3 Header, Male
1J61x2 Screw Terminal, PN# 2094506
1Q12N3904
1R11.5k ohm
1R21M ohm
2R3, R44.7k ohm
1R52.2k ohm
1R6220 ohm
2R7, R10Pot - 20k ohm
1R810 ohm
1R92.2k ohm
1U1MM54104 DigiTalker CPU
1U2MM52164-SSR1 Speech ROM 1
1U3MM52164-SSR2 Speech ROM 2
1U474LS04
1U5LM386
1U6MCP23008
1U7LM7805
1U8LM358
1X14 MHz Parallel Resonance

Arduino Sample Code demonstrating the board's interface
MP3 recording of the program output


This product is currently in a prototyping phase and not available for purchase.