{"id":64,"date":"2017-11-11T12:25:36","date_gmt":"2017-11-11T12:25:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/?p=64"},"modified":"2017-11-11T12:37:35","modified_gmt":"2017-11-11T12:37:35","slug":"i-knew-i-was-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/?p=64","title":{"rendered":"I knew I was right!"},"content":{"rendered":"

My son recently got his GCSE results – all ‘A’s and ‘A*’s.\u00a0 He outshone my 7 ‘A’s, 2 ‘B’s and a ‘C’ (in Art) that I\u00a0achieved in my ‘O’ Levels and I’m really proud of him.\u00a0 It got me to thinking about my Electronics ‘AO’ level.<\/p>\n

I got an ‘A’ (there were no ‘A*’s in those days) but it always\u00a0bugged me that my practical project, a speech synthesiser based on the SP0256 speech chip from General Instruments (now Microchip) never worked.\u00a0 I blamed the PCB.\u00a0 It wasn’t a bad first attempt at etching but I had to repair some of the thinner tracks and eventually ran out of time.<\/p>\n

After I got my Arduino Uno, I looked around for some projects and came across this gem at http:\/\/nsd.dyndns.org\/speech\/<\/a>. \u00a0I still had an SP0256 chip from the 1980’s and a 3.2768MHz crystal, so I set it up on the breadboard and, lo and behold, it worked!<\/p>\n

So I was vindicated – it was the PCB at fault, not my software coding.<\/p>\n

I went on to design a dedicated circuit on stripboard with an ATmega328P (the processor on the Arduino Uno) and a serial interface, so I could upload code from the Arduino IDE using an USB to Serial converter.\u00a0 Here are some pictures if you are interested:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My son recently got his GCSE results – all ‘A’s and ‘A*’s.\u00a0 He outshone my 7 ‘A’s, 2 ‘B’s and a ‘C’ (in Art) that I\u00a0achieved in my ‘O’ Levels and I’m really proud of him.\u00a0 It got me to thinking about my Electronics ‘AO’ level. I got an ‘A’ (there were no ‘A*’s in … Continue reading “I knew I was right!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.mtfwalker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}