Sunday, June 2, 2013

VCP200 Voice Recognition IC

Among my old items was a VCP200 voice recognition integrated circuit sold by Radio Shack in the 1980s.

Description

The VCP200 speaker-independent word recognizer, from Voice Control Products, Inc. (VCPI), is a mask-programmed Motorola 6804 microprocessor. The 6804 is a 20-pin device that implements most of the standard 6800-series instruction set and capabilities, and contains one kilobyte of onboard ROM.  The VCP200 use a ROM that is mask programmed at the time of manufacture with the appropriate data and control information.

Documentation

Unfortunately the data sheet in my package was missing.  Google has not been my friend.  I will summarize the available information after some tough searching in order of best quality first:
  1. Radio-Electronics magazine, April 1991, Experiments in Voice Recognition, Daniel Cooper, page 49 is the best resource online.  It has the chip pinout, circuit, and parts list.
  2. Radio Shack "Faxback" documentation - The picture quality is rather poor but the text document is rather good.  A written pinout is here and a pretty useless schematic is here.
  3. The book Designing with Speech Processing Chips by Ricardo Jimenez pages 308-315 has some information and many of the pages may be viewed in Google Books.
  4. The book Gordon McComb's Gadgeteers Goldmine, chapter 26 has some information but even the author admitted in the Parallax forums there are issues with his work.  Gordon notes there was an errata issued for the official documentation since lost.
Availability: There are posts in forums over the years by people either asking for these chips or finding some, often new old stock from Radio Shack.  I have not found any offered on eBay today.

Now my decision is do I build it out or not.  I would like a voice activated circuit for my shop light. . .

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