Category Archives: Sound
Articles involving sound
Acorn Speech PHROM TMS6100 Emulator
This project creates a TMS6100 speech PHROM (PHrase Read Only Memory) for use with the TMS5220 Voice Synthesis Processor in an Acorn BBC Microcomputer. Whilst it’s still possible to purchase TMS5220 ICs from sites like Ebay, the TMS6100 was a mask-programmed ROM that Acorn produced specifically for their speech upgrade and is therefore difficult and […]
Fast Hartley Transformation Library for AVR microcontrollers
This article demonstrates an implementation of Fourier transform known as the ‘Fast Hartley Transformation’ or FHT. The FHT is very similar to the more popular FFT however it operates on a real number input (where-as the FFT requires a complex number input of both real and imaginary parts). The primary reason to use FHT over […]
Stylophone Studio 5
The Stylophone Studio 5 is a project to recreate the original 1968 Dubreq Stylophone which sounds and reacts just like the original (and even contains a replica of the original circuitry) however it also fully supports both MIDI in and MIDI out over USB and can be controlled by studio software such as Cubase. There […]
MicroSimon
This project shows how to create an MB Electronics Simon game clone using an 8-pin PIC12F683 microcontroller. The game includes a full emulation of the original Simon ‘game 1’ and the ability to select from 4 skill levels which control the number of colours you must repeat in a sequence in order to win the […]
Real-Time Audio Spectrum Analyser
This project implements a real-time audio spectrum analyser using a PIC18F4550 8-bit microcontroller. The spectrum frequency analysis is performed by a highly optimised 16-bit Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) routine coded entirely in C. The output from the FFT is displayed using a 128×64 graphical LCD to allow a real-time view of an audio signal. YouTube […]
Reverse Engineering the Stylophone
The DubReq Stylophone is an icon of English innovation originally made in the UK during 1968 and famously promoted by Rolf Harris until manufacturing was stopped in 1975. The ‘original’ Stylophone has (since 1975) been remade several times, firstly the ‘new sound’ Stylophone which was based around a 555 timer oscillator and more recently as […]
Commodore SID 6581 Datasheet
This article is a reproduction of the original Commodore 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) datasheet. I made this by taking a photocopy of an original document and using OCR to capture the content, then the document was hand-edited, formatted for mediawiki and reassembled here with (cleaned-up and straightened) diagrams and tables. The reason for this […]
UltimateSIMON
UltimateSIMON is a project which takes a broken MB Electronics SIMON game and replaces the original PCB with a completely custom PIC18F2550 based board with improved sound, lights and the ability to be programmed and customised. There’s even a USB header, in case you want to make the project even more crazy. There are a […]
LED Colour Organ
I’ve always been interested in sound-to-light conversion since both playing music and electronics are both hobbies of mine, so I decided it would be great to build a ‘colour organ’ of some sort. Much surfing and googling later revealed that there didn’t seem to be any pre-existing designs available on the web that suited my […]
Simon18F
Simon18F is a project to replace the custom MB4850 processor of the MB Electronics Simon game with a PIC18F2550; initially to emulate the original Simon games and, later, to enhance the existing games and add new ones. For a video of this project including commentary please see the following: Hardware The Simon18F processor board is […]