Chapter 7
Murmuring Merlin
In This Chapter
Scoping out the schematic
Running down the parts list
Breadboarding the wizard’s circuit
Programming a sound synthesizer chip
Placing the board in the puppet
Getting sounds from Merlin
A
picture can be worth a thousand words, but sometimes a word — or
sound — is just what’s needed. In this project, you work with a sound
synthesizer chip, an amplifier, and a speaker. With this setup, you can pro-
duce almost any sound you can imagine.You can place a sound chip in just about anything and use switches to acti-
vate sounds. For this project, we chose a hand puppet (ours happens to be a
wizard because we’re into fantasy fiction); a hollow puppet lets you easily
insert the project breadboard and switches. However, you can use anything
you like for your talking pal.As you work through this project, you discover how to work with programma-
ble sound synthesizer chips as well as a bit about how amplification works.The Big Picture: Project Overview.............................................................
When you complete this project, you’ll have a talking hand puppet. You can
program the synthesizer chip inside the puppet with any messages you like.
For example, we programmed ours to say, “The check’s in the mail,” “You
can’t have more money,” and “Where’s the darn chapter?!” — and then we
gave it to our editor.