Friday, December 25, 2015

Robot Christmas

AVA Disco Mode


The robot received a set of Ikea Dioder LED strips for Christmas. Below is a quick video of AVA in disco mode. There will be a separate post on controlling these strips using an Arduino at some stage.




AVA Christmas


In keeping with the Christmas theme here is AVA singing a Christmas Carol using the EMIC 2 Speech Synthesizer. The Emic 2 Text-to-Speech Module is a multi-language voice synthesizer that converts a stream of digital text into speech. You can select either the Epson (default) or DECtalk parsers.


Note that the Emic 2 uses DECtalk version 5.0.E1. The Flame of Hope web site has a heap of DECtalk songs but they are for earlier versions of the DECtalk parser and require tweaking to work with the EMIC 2. Thanks to Ron on the Parallax forum for these tips on converting the text files:

  • you often have to change an "L" to "LL"
  • sometimes you need a space between any character preceding the "ey" phonetic symbol.

The following is the string used to produce the song in the video above, should you wish to try out your EMIC 2's singing ability.


"[:phone arpa speak on][:rate 190][:n2][:dv ap 200 sm 100 ri 100][R EY<200,17>N<100>DRAO<200,24>PS<100>AO<200>N<100>ROW<300,19>ZIX<200,17>Z<100>AE<150>N<100>D<50>WIH<300,12>SKRR<200,17>Z<100>AO<200>N<100>KIH<300,19>TAH<150,17>N<100>Z<50>_<300>BRAY<200>T<100>KAO<300,24>PRR<300>K EH<300,19>TEL<200,17>Z<100>AE<150>N<100>D<50>War<200,12>M<100>WUH<300,17>LL EH<200>N<100>MIH<300,19>TAH<150,17>N<100>Z<50>_<300>BRAW<200>N<100>PEY<300,24>PRR<300,22>PAE<300,17>KIH<300,19>JHIX<200,15>Z<100>TAY<200>D<100>AH<200,22>P<100>WIH<200,20>TH<100>STRIH<300,13>NX<200>Z<100>_<300>DHIY<200,12>Z<100>AR<300,13>AX<300,15>FYU<300,17>AH<200,18>V<100>MAY<300,20>FEY<300,22>VRR<300,24>EH<200,22>T<100>THIH<500,16>NX<300>Z<100>][:n0]"


Arduino Code



To make it easy for our Arduino Mega 2650 to communicate with the EMIC2 we created a library called synthesizer.h. As you can see the Arduino connects to the EMIC 2 via one of its serial ports.



To use this class, I have created a robot class which looks like:



Then in the main.ino file all you need to do is:



You don't have to use C++ classes like I did but it makes it easier to maintain your code. You can also ignore the bits which refer to the motors and other sensors, I just leave it in here for completeness.


2 comments:

  1. Can the code above be used with an Arduino at all? Thanks.

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  2. Hi Tegwyn - not by itself. You need to connect it to the EMIC 2 Speech Synthesizer. I will update the post above with the relevant classes that I use.

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