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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- Dave breadboards a 1988 vintage Tandy / Radio Shack VCP200 speaker independent voice recognition chip from Voice Control Products Inc.
Will it work after 27 years?
Will it recognise his Australian accent?
Special guest appearance by Sagan!
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I liked Sagan's mini meter review. He's right too. He's going to save a whole load of pocket money by not buying a Fluke. I had a speech recognition toy when I was a kid. It recognised yes and no, but in reality it only detected the ssssss and ohhhh bits.
Yeah me too I remember saying every word and sound I could think of trying to figure out what it was ''listening'' for... It was rubbish... Todays speech recognition amazes me every time I use it LOL
all that time that IC has been patiently waiting to be found and used, how satisfied it must feel to be awakened from it's slumber on Dave's bench!
If I'm not mistaken, it's zero-cross rate recognition behind the curtains: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-crossing_rate
I remember reading about how to implement it for a Z80 in a robotics book.
Hey Dave, being that I'm from New Jersey, I looked up VCP just to see where they were. Your assumption that it may have been a spinoff of some PhD research is probably spot on... their address in Hoboken is 2 blocks from Stevens Institute of Technology which did indeed foster a whole slew of tech companies in that neighborhood... and also happens to be my alma mater. Might help you in tracking down some more information. Cheers!
Interesting, thanks.
The cleaners you see on Google Street View would just be the ground floor business, by the way. There's a door underneath the "RS" of "CLEANERS" that would lead to stairs up - each floor might be rented to a different business. VCP is Suite 3 according to LinkedIn's address, so they would have the offices on the 3rd floor. (Or what you Australians and Brits would call the second floor).
Sagan will be building circuits within a year or two. Remarkable. Good on ya Dave, he's a smart kid!
I'm amazed at how well that chip actually works.
From the moment I saw the filtering circuit... I wanted to not just see the waveforms on the scope, but to actually _hear_ what voice sounded like at each of the different filter stages... You should drop a sound file on the forums or something so we can hear what that chip needs to "hear" in order to work.
Yeah, that would have been interesting. Didn't cross my mind at the time!
I put one of these together when I was younger. I was running it through a walkie-talkie, so I (erroneously) assumed that the amplified output of the talkie would be sufficient... So I skipped the op-amp section. I didn't understand in my youth that that was MORE than just an amplifier, but also a filter. Never got mine to work, and I set it aside. Of course, now I know WHY it failed. I still have that chip somewhere... Just gotta find it. Maybe I can finish it.
richfiles Hrm... when I was a kid I daisy-chained a CD player output through 4-5 cassette players with those 1/8" TRS to cassette adapters.
Now I know what gain structure is. Still, it was fun to do.
So nice to see Sagan playing with your stuff. He is very smart! My 2 years old girl also love to play with my electronics boards and for mammy ´s desperate the screw drivers and soldering iron.
I was always intrigued by this when I saw it in the Radio Shack stores back in the day, but I just never bought one. I am so glad you took the time to go thru this and make a video on it! Thanks for sharing!
Pretty impressive for 1988, I think - and it's great to see this "blast from the past" in operation!
thanks dave, excellent video!!!
Hi Gastón, nice to see you here
Love the shots of Sagen. That is awesome. Amazing that he has learned so much already. You are giving him a great start in the modern world. Keep up the great work Dave! Time invested in our children is never wasted.
Thank's for all the content Dave. What a great blast from the past. It's also great to see how quickly Sagan is growing. He's got a great Teacher!
Pretty cool chip! I don't think I'll be modding my car for VCP200 voice control though. Stop = AAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!
Great vid! Thanks! I recall reading an article in the early 80's about the difficulties involved in trying to develop a speech to text system. The article was titled 'How to wreck a nice beach' which is what the machine typed out when they said 'How to recognize speech'.
That was EXACTLY (+/- 2 ms) the right amount of Sagan. Loved how you (I assume) put the meter in diode mode so he could "test" the LED and see it light up. Seeing him push in the LEDs is inspiring at such a young age. Awesome.
I don't need to see Sagan on every video but you seem to have the mix perfect. And he was on topic! Thanks Dave for another great video.
Good video, R.I.P. Radio Shack
Being a grandpa I think it's great that Dave gets his son involved. Especially these days when you hear nothing but complaints about young kids just playing video games and sitting on their duff. Sagan may want to follow in daddy's shoes, what an excellent way to teach them while they're young and their minds soak everything up. I've always enjoyed being around young kids as they investigate and absorb the world around them. If you don't care to sit through a child investigating the fascinating world of electronics then simply fast forward to when Dave starts in again. Simple as that!
I love seeing the progression your son has had with electronics!
Daaawww Sagan playing with the breadboard and stuff was awesome. You should do a few quick episodes where you teach him how to make like a electromagnet with a nail... or some basic stuff like that would be awesome.
Very interesting video, this chip was really advanced for the 1980's ahead of its time in many ways. Good to see Sagan again !
It's great to see this hooked up. As a kid I wanted one of these but I never was able to afford it, they were about $30 at my Radio Shack. :)
Brilliant video, one of your best Dave. A big thumbs up from me. Amazing what you can do with 1K and a bit of machine code, I remember programming a basic Space Invaders game with 1K on a ZX81.
Nice video and I love to see your kid! See your kid make me think about my kid, cant wait to play with him when he have 3 years old. Nice work EEVBlog.
That moment when Sagan grabs a component, looks at the schematic and thoughtfully goes "hmmm >.> " before just stuffing it in and hoping for the best... :D It really warms my heart, as that's still how I build circuits now!
great vid! thanks for the upload, was slightly disapointed at some peoples comments about Sagan, he's just helping out and learning! whats the issue with that, at least hes got a great dad. Thanks Dave! bloody ripper - keep 'em coming.
Great video, just the kind of retro tech I love. Thanks for scoping the outputs too, very good illustration! Sagan's bloody impressive too, if he's really breadboarding from a schematic at 3!
Sagan is just awesome :-P I've been told that I ran the VCR by the time I was 2...Something tells me he's pretty similar. Bringing him up right I say!
Memory lane...
Voice recognition and speech synthesizers was the thing one tried in those days either with integrated circuits or with hobby computers e.g. BBC micro, TI-99/4. Especially after the film Wargames.
Excellent video.
isojed I need to find my SPO256 speech chips
EEVblog
After all this time you made me look for the VCP200 that I bought from Radio Shack back then. I found two of them..... AND.... one SP0256. I guess it's time to dust them off and play...
Great videos and EXCELLENT explanations... Keep it up.
I also had a play around with an SPO256 back in the day. I think I was about 10 at the time. A friend's dad worked at National Semiconductor and brought back several 'digitalker' dev boards - one of which made it into my hands :) had a numeric keypad to program in sequences of phonemes. Oh the fun!
It was quite interesting when you started probing with the oscilloscope and we were able to get a visual representation - especially interesting to someone like myself with basic electrical and electronic knowledge.
Around the time that this chip came out, I remember hearing about the exploits of musician-hobbyists purchasing bucket-brigade delay lines (from Tandy) which were used to do spring-less reverb and tape-less echo.
Imagine some critical application where this thing has been built in.
"Off, off. Off. OFF, damnit you! OFF!"
Basic yet magnificent. Thanks Dave.
Loved the way Sagan played with LED's...reminiscence of my old days. Beauty!
Great educational video Dave, please do more.
Really cool Dave! Both educational and entertaining for me who's not an engineer per se! Most of the stuff is a bit over my head, but hey it's still very cool! Big thumbs up for this!!
I've worked with Voice Recognition in various forms sense the mid 90's, so I find this kind of stuff very fascinating, as it's just amazing to think how many hours I spent with software like Dragon Naturally Speaking and VIA Voice back in the day trying to get them to recognize my voice lol! Awesome video Dave :-).
I'm impressed...do remember the "real Radio Shack" back in the day. This is one of your best videos..I really enjoyed
watching...put the butter on the toast !!!
Seeing Sagan playing with the breadboard reminds me of when I was younger and my dad would buy me breadboards and let me waste his components from production haha I remember being so excited at my first OP Amp circuit a LM386 Headphone op amp. Those were the days. :')
For 1980s tech, that's awesome! And, I don't want to stick my foot in my mouth, but I want to say I saw these in Radio Shack for sale as late as the early 2000s, back when I was in college.
OK, someone has archived all the old Radio Electronics mags.. there goes my week.
Seriously good mag back in the day.. my first exposure to chips like this and that new fangled micro from Microchip (got an EPROM UV light just for playing with those PICchips.).
I like his enthusiastic way of explaining Electronics
Nice explanation of the pre-circuit, seems a 1-bit A/D converter needs a lot of pre-filtering. Shocked that you didn't try "Please open the pod bay doors, HAL"...
Great video, and it's lovely to see Sagan on here as well. Please ignore the nay-sayers, you've got a clever little man there, you're proud of him and rightly so. I'm a father myself and couldn't be happier with how curious my little ones are at such a young age - perhaps the miserable amongst us will feel differently when they have children of their own...
interesting little device. Nice appearance by Sagan. My lads taking an interest my tinkering in the shed, perhaps I'll teach him how to light an LED with a spare meter, seems safe enough, obviously making sure he doesn't try and swallow the damn LED!
Oh god dave, i laughed my ass off when you were testing the circuit, Thumbs up! Keep up the good work mate!
this was a brilliant video, really enjoyed this one.
"Side cuttas!!" Sagan is awesome, he's wicked smart for a 3 year old. Already better at EE than I am.
Your son just blew my mind.
Good video, I never seen voice recognition chip before, quite interesting that it's microcontroller based. If it's in ESD safe condition, theses chips can withstand storage for quite some time, I had germanium transistors from 1969 - 1971 that were in good condition after decades in the box.
This does bring back memories. Somewhere I have the big IC text-to-speech (or something like that) chip to go along with this one. If I remember right these two chips together make a really cool project. I may try to find this speech recognition chip.
"Off damit!" LOL Excellent demo, Dave - thanx! Oh and Sagan is awesome!
Sagan seems to be learning a lot. I think he's definitely on a great path. :)
sagan is a blast! gotta teach my future kids electronics and stuff like dave does....
True voice recognition was "5 years away" for something like 25 years. ;)
I remember those chips. Wanted to play with one.
Love the way the "Yes/No" logic is opposite to "On/Off"! :)
Sean Pearce Yes, I thought that interesting! It all comes down to the phoneme energy in each frequency band.
EEVblog
I suspect that's it, I wonder if simply feeding it the right sequence of frequencies would work? (as sinewaves or square waves), for example yes would end in a high frequency after a low frequency (the Y and E)...
Thats going to be one rather electronically-minded kid when he get's older, wish I had a similar upbringing.
Rather interesting video, Cheers!
This was awesome Dave !
I'm glad to see that you finally managed to recruit somebody :)
Great video Dave.
I don't understand why some people are so negative about Sagan's appearance.
You may like this or not (personally i do) but here is facts you cannot deny :
- he only appears 2-3 mins, about less than 10% of the total video. nothing.
- he do stuff related to electronics, it's not like Dave show him sleeping or whatever. It fits the theme.
- it acts as a "break" in this quite long video (between theory and practice).
Dave, be proud of your kid and please continue teaching us electronics.
Sagan already know more than some of my colleges in the end of electronics technician course when I finished it in 2003 :P
Last semester we did transistor amplifiers with similar microphones :)
Adorable Sagan :)
We have some Archer and Tandy electronic stuff here in the states. It's very rare to find, but they are here. Most everything is Radio Shack Branded here...
I don't know why I can't reply on the comment thread about Sagan but I for one like that Dave includes Sagan in the videos.
that's great parenting in a great video :)
Never mind with the recruitment drive Dave, give it a year or so and Sagan will be pretty handy around the lab!
I've loved the kid part! Watched it two times
If it can not handle a accent Dave then you better store it in the big archive bin :-)
O and I did love to see Sagan making a even better circuit in a jiffy ;-)
Having the comparator lumped into the same chip as the gain amps could be throwing things off a bit. Also, using a comparator tends to swamp out the high freqs (low freqs steer the output.) Maybe a differentiator with a threshold would be better. I used one to send digital voice over a 1200 bps packet radio link in the early 90's using a 4.77 MHz PC - bits were captured via a serial port DSR line - raspy, but useable!
Wow! Voice recognition is so amazing.
hey dave, you waving your pen around at 13:00 made my cat jump onto my laptop & minimise the window. gotta be careful there mate :)
I'm surprised it worked as well as it did. I certainly remember seeing them in the store back in the day and briefly wondered what I could make with one. I wasn't aware they were limited to 5 phrases -- it was not very obvious from the packaging.
+gamccoy I bought one back in the day. Opened the package, saw how limited it was and my dreams of building my own voice-controlled personal assistant vanished, so I never used the chip. Probably still have it around here somewhere.
Amazing, your son gets an perfect skilled electronics engineer!
I don't know the Primer(?), but you should believe him...;-)
He remembers me to my son. He want to constuct all the time with my beloved electronic test labs...
Greetings from Germany
Lol..."Reverse Daminit!" Thumbs up for Sagan's circuit building!
Sagan is doing the same as i did when i was that age, working with dads tools :)
If he keeps interested he will have a great head start for a career.
wow thats amazing. hes 3 and already doing electronics. genius
i suspect they saved memory space by only sampling either the first word in its entirety OR more likely the first half of the word. they all start with very distinctive sound wave-forms, hence why they used the commands LEFT TURN & TURN RIGHT, instead of TURN RIGHT & TURN LEFT.
I've still got one of those around in my collection. Guess I don't need to bother building it, better to keep it in pristine package as curiosity.
Surprisingly functional considering when it was made and how little resources it uses..
haha I love Dave's reaction when Sagan rejects the fluke :D
Someone tell me where to buy the DaveCad please. I am in desperate need.
Here:
github.com/danieljabailey/DaveCAD
Haskellerz
Hahaha, someone actually made it? I was always wondering if someone made a functional or parody program based of that.
Does this have the Dave seal of approval? LOL.
Very cool video Dave, Regards to Sagan
I think I bought one of these (and a voice recording IC) from Radio Shack when I was a kid. "Requires minimal support hardware" -- sadly, too much for me at the time. I'll see if I can find them...
Could you record audio after the comparator so we can hear what the chip is "hearing"?
Also, are there any methods (ie. hacks) of dumping ROMs from these micros? If not, how about finding someone willing to do the decapping for you? ;-)
***** I'm not sure. Probably if you were that keen. Anyone know?
***** EEVblog I imagine that the post-comparator signal could probably be recorded in a similar way to any other audio signal by just mapping the signal and ground lines to a TRS connector and feeding it through either an analog recording device or a computer with something like audacity installed
EEVblog ***** Some micros have hidden commands to dump the program. The SNES DSP-1's data ROM (Harvard Arch) was dumped by accident years ago by finding an undocumented command: code.google.com/p/dsp1-disasm/source/browse/dsp1a_prg.asm (line 2406 of this attempt of mine to annotate the chip).
As a matter of fact, I like to see your kid in the video very much - guy from Hong Kong
I remember seeing that chip at Radio Shack. Its was expensive I am not quite sure but I think is sold for about $20.
18:29 - the legacy of Dave Jones lives on.
It might help to add a compander and noise gate to the circuit.
By the way, have you considered getting a ZIF socket to protect your special ICs?
Are you a professor at a college of any sort? You're honestly a really good teacher with these
I don't understand the Sagan haters out there. As a dad and electronics enthusiast, it does my heart good to see my kids probing with a multimeter, playing with a radio scanner, or taking apart TV remotes and toys.
I think that the principle of operation is very similar to the detection of DTMF. And does not require a lot of calculations. All the magic in the LUT.
I guess Sagan's CV came out on top of all of the applications for an assistant you advertised recently. Can't say I blame you after some of the characters I've met recently. Kids nowadays eh!
Too bad Claudio does not have pride in a youngster who is being encouraged by his DAD to learn things that many adults find confusing. Good to see what advances have taken place in the electronics world over the recent decades. Keep up the good tutoring Dave. Your son will soon be posting HIS OWN BLOG ! Whoopie Dad !
I had one of these when I was a single-digit-aged kid but never did anything with it. I wanted to "program" it by feeding it instructions recorded on audiotape and have it drive a gutted RC car-- an ur-drone :) Never managed to put it together, though.
Let's be honest, this thing was ahead of it's time as voice recognition goes. Especially considering it's speaker independent and DIY. Would the Radio Shack of today put a forward thinking similar item on their shelves now? Hardly.
Nice Video Dave ;) As a German I am just wondering why its left turn and turn right and not left turn and right turn ?
im guessing it's to make it easier to distinguish between them.
combatplayer Yes, probably matching on the 'turn' part only, so anything-turn = left, turn-anything = right, the position of the 'turn' is all that determines which direction is matched.
turn(speech patern)-silence-something => turn right, but something-silence-turn(speech patern) => left turn. At one pint Dave said just turn and turn right out pulsed, my best guess is its seeking for the turn patern rather the complete command, so little micro to handle this, so there most be a trick somewhere.
Maybe it has something to do with American English and English English. The yanks and brits always seem to do things backwards from each other. So maybe it's a way to accommodate the brits and yanks. Hehehe, that's a stretch.
*****
Yes that would be my guess too. At one point EEVblog said Turn and it switch the LED on before right was said. It's probably matching turn and not worrying about right, that's just there to help it make sense to humans. You could try saying "turn" and "left" rather than the full versions to see if that makes it work
Sagan will be calculating current limiting resistors of the top of his head before most kids can do algebra. Hopefully that insulates him from the effects of Justin Bieber.
Dave, the breadboard whisperer!
why are people complaining about dave's son in the video? if you don't like his son in the video,, don't watch it!! its simple guys. great video dave. its your channel do what you want.
Yikes! I happened across a pen that looked nice, and decided to sketch a little silicon on paper. Much to my surprise, the darned thing started running DaveCAD. Do I need to send you any royalties or is the pen perpetually licensed?
About halfway through this, your clip cut to Sagan. OMG, I'm so glad that you've had the camera rolling for the random breadboard moment. Maybe I'll just put something in the mailbag for him... y'know, in lieu of royalties. Is that okay?