Kidtech 'ABC Soup'

[deathbender]

Has anyone ever bent one of these? The good: No black blob but discrete chips. The bad: I'm not sure where to start...

[computer at sea]

I'd just start by digging into those Malaysian chips.

[Gordonjcp]

The TI chip is probably the clever one.  The 74HC164s are just shift registers, probably used for scanning the buttons.

[mr ibrahiem]

BY ANY CHANCE DOES IT SPEAK GERMAN COS IF SO THEN I BID ON IT AS THE NAME OF IBRAHIEMDOOVDE I CANT BELIEVE IT I TURN MY BACK FOR ONE SEC AND I LOST ...OH WELL NEVER MIND..COS I GOT A SYGMATIC ELITE  BILINGUA TEACHER/TUTOR  FROM 1975 AND IT TALKS and kinda sounds likea old  intelevoice module ,it speaks three languages  english russian and german . got it from a boot sale so haha  oh has any one bent one of these and if not if i bent it would i be the first man in the world to do so cos if so then WHEEEEYYYYYYY!!!!!!

[Circuitbenders]

You've already started a thread about that thing, can we keep this one on topic please.

[mr ibrahiem]

OK sorry about that ... i letted it go to my hed   

[deathbender]

BY ANY CHANCE DOES IT SPEAK GERMAN COS IF SO THEN I BID ON IT AS THE NAME OF IBRAHIEMDOOVDE I CANT BELIEVE IT I TURN MY BACK FOR ONE SEC AND I LOST

It does speak german, indeed... Nothing special though as i'm from germany and got it on eBay.de... Lol... and i got it with only one bid (the only bid for this item at all, now i know why)...

BTW, i 'bent' this thing yesterday... It was quite dissapointing. I could only get it to glitch a little bit (with some brutal effort) and nothing else...

When you look at the picture (top of the thread), there are 3 ICs aligned vertical on the PCB. The right one is the 'smart' one as Gordonjcp assumed. But it's not as 'smart' as i hoped it would be... Now when you look at this chip you'll see a small brown and vertically aligned part next to the lower left side of it, between the TI chip and the two light blue electrolytic capacitors. This is a 2 leg crystal. And that's where i found the glitch.

What i did was installing two buttons, one that connects the positive terminal of the speaker through a 100nF cap to the lower left leg of the TI chip and another one that shorts the lower left leg to the leg above. I could have achieved the same goal by using a 2pole switch or button but i didn't have one at hand.  What's the cap for you might ask. Ok, it may be superstition but it felt as the glitch worked much better when the cap was there as to when i left it out (that's the same i experienced with my Casio SA-21, the glitch worked much better when i used a cap to short the ANxxxxx chip to the OKIxxxxx). Maybe absolute nonsense but it didn't harm anything so i just put the cap in.

Maybe one fine day i'll try to swap the crystal or try a 555 circuit but i don't have much experience in doing this (except in Gameboys of course) so i may as well leave the soup seasoned as it is now    (dunno if this pun will work...  )