Whether it’s a Furby or Buzz Lightyear’s button that plays, ‘To infinity as well as beyond’, most digital audio applications inside toys are really simple affairs. There’s no Arduino as well as wave shield, as well as there’s definitely no Raspi streaming audio from the Internet. No, the audio inside most toys are one or two chip gadgets capable of storing about a minute or so of audio. [makapuf] developed an electronic board game for his kids, as well as in the process decided to add some digital audio. The result is extremely similar to what you would discover in an actual engineered product, as well as is simple sufficient to be duplicated by just about anyone.
[makapuf]’s game is based on game of the Goose, only brought into the contemporary world with electronic speaking dice. An ATtiny2313 was selected for the microcontroller as well as an AT45D 4 Megabit Flash module provided the storage for 8 bit/8khz audio.
The electronic part of the game has a few functions. The very first is calling out numbers, which is done by playing recordings of [makapuf] reading, ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, … ‘twelve’, ‘thir-‘, ‘teen’ as well as so on. This data is pumped out over a pin on the ATtiny with a little amplifier as well as into a speaker. After that, the code is a simple matter of keeping track of where the players are on the board, keeping score, as well as generating randomish numbers.
It’s an remarkable exercise in engineering, making a rather challenging game with a bare minimum of parts. [makapuf] estimated he spent under $4 in parts, so if you’re looking to add digital audio to a job on the cheap, we can’t picture doing better.
You can see a video of [makapuf]’s job after the break.