Adding speech capability to Devo

I know Taranis has speech capability, such as battery voltage readout. I also understand the Devo hardware can only produce simple beeps, but not capable of having speech. It will be nice if we can add speech function to Devo. I'm thinking of adding an arduino board with some kind of speech module. Then, interface it with the Devo transmitter. What do you guys think? Do you think this is useful? I don't know how difficult it will be, but I believe it's possible to implement.

Personally, I'd love it. It's one of the reasons I'm thinking about buying a Taranis for outdoor aircraft (where deviation's ability to run umpteen zillion protocols isn't quite as important).

So what do we need? Is there a speaker of some kind in the Devo transmitters? I guess adding a small one isn't a problem.

You need to communicate with the board. IIRC, there are unused pins on all the supported transmitters. On the 7e, they get used for the switch mods, so maybe not so much that one. But check the connections articles in the articles link on the left. So ok, that's possible.

But how do you plan on getting the sounds INTO the devo? I believe the Taranis lets you copy them to an SD card you plug into the radio. I don't think any of the Devo's have that capability. No microphone, and the standard external data connector is USB. You can read data from the trainer port, so I guess you could plug a microphone into that to record sounds, but ugh.

Seems like the best option would be to use a small, fixed set of sounds that you update in USB mode, the same way you do model icons, fonts, etc. Not great, but not bad.

One simple solution would be to use an Adafruit Audio FX board . It has the advantage of having it's own storage for sound. This one holds a minute of mono, and another $5 will up it to 30 minutes. I think the former should be fine for alerts, but maybe not for reading values. It's also not clear if you can update files via the UART control. If so, it would be ideal. Otherwise, we'd want it so you pretty much never changed them.

I was thinking having all speech being done in the arduino. The Devo only needs to send some kind of command messages to arduino. For example, sending a command "Play voltage 11.5V" to arduino and it will use a TTS module (or other pre-recorded voice files) to actually speak out the voltage message. All required hardware, speaker, TTS/speech module, etc. will be connected and controlled by arduino. The Deviation firmware only needs to send pre-defined message to arduino in order to activate the corresponding speech. However, I've no idea how to interface between the Devo and arduino. Maybe via SPI?

PB, I love your idea of having a bluetooth on the UniveralTx and interface it with a mobile phone for voice control and other stuff.

The er9x folks integrated a voice module for the 9x. Never researched the details but the thread is active. I think the first version shared I/O lines with the 9x LCD, but scanning the last page there's talk of a new serial version. Source for ideas if nothing else.

The er9x voice module uses an audio sound board that's very similar to the adafruit board I suggested above, except it uses an SD card instead of having the memory on the card. And the Adafruit card is half the size of the board they're working on now, and also smaller than some of the RF modules we're already putting in our transmitters.

Unless you just want to do another custom PCB layout, is there any reason to avoid the Adafruit board? Ok, it's single-sourced, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could get the PCB layout files from Adafruit if you asked. They're open source fans and good folks.

Just got familiar with the Adafruit board and it could be a good option. Looking at the serial port protocol it doesn't have a command to concatenate on play which makes constructing prompts like "voltage" "eleven" "point" "five" more difficult.

I mentioned the 9x effort as a place to learn from. Will spend some time reviewing that thread for ideas. I'd love to have voice support.

Hi there,

it´s an big project we are talking about......so my thinking is:

An additional hardware will be needed, especially when taking a look on the memory of the F7 / F12e ..... so, if it should work for all coming up TX´s.
Adding an bluetooth modul for any external device like an smartphone / android seems to be one of the easiest options.
If you are interested, take a look at Matt´s project. "RC telemetry for Hitec Aurora 9" LINK
This project is not finished, but still works preponderantly - also in different languages The implemented telemetry data is for Hitec Aurora 9 only. Just take a look - you will like it. Thumb up for Matt.

maybe better continue in this threat?
www.deviationtx.com/forum/builds/5089-vo...build?start=60#48198


Audio messages seems up and running, by installing df player module, Deviation to sends commands at events to the DF player module.