Speak n spell bends

[brewmachine]

HI,
I am in the process of working out the bends on my first project, Ive looked at some boardscans and got some of the standard loops and glitches aswell as a few others that I found on the way. I also found a few that triggered the certain modes of gameplay aswell as enter what seem to be random letters. What I was wondering is if anyone knows of a way to control which letters are entered (specifically the 'go' and 'enter' keys) so the circuit can be controlled without the membrane (as i am planning to rehouse the circuit) or if not have any advice on removing the membrane without damaging it so it can be re-attached in the new housing.

also i am having trouble understanding how to put resets on the board and control the pitch - ive found some body contacts to lower the pitch but can this also raise the pitch by using pots?

sorry for all the questions but as you can probably tell Im a bit of a noob to all this - any other help would also be appreciated 

Cheers

Brew

[brewmachine]

anyone?

[Tyler1144]

Resets are easy, just cut the wire that comes from the battery and attach them to the pins on a normally closed push button switch, then when you push the switch it will disconnect them, or with a normally open you can just quickly short positive and negative together to kill the power.

Pitch bend is easy too, there are 3 pins towards the bottom, one is a base point, one is pitch up, one is pitch down. My speak & read has similar circuitry and the 2 pitch pins are at the bottom left section of big pins and they are next to each other.

[Ciderfeks]

casperelectronics.com (excellent site) has loads of good stuff on the Speak & xxxx range, as well as tons of other toys/keyboards etc. There's a schematic showing pitch bend points (amongst loads of other bends) on a Speak & Spell here  <http://www.casperelectronics.com/images/finishedpieces/speak-n-spell/Speak-n-Xbending/Picture%202.jpg>  They are labelled as "touch points" but will work just as well with a pot - wire the middle lug to "base" point and go from there. To prevent your Speak from crashing at exteme pitch up and down, you'll need to add a 50k trimmer pot or similar value resistor to each side . As far as the membrane goes from what I can gather its attached to the board via a kind of ribbon cable which just slots into a socket on the board - it does come out with a bit of gentle wiggling and goes back in quite easily if you use some thin card or similar to gently push it back in. I've only ever tried this on a dead Speak so I cant vouch for the beak-a-bility risk factor but those plastic ribbons do tend to tear easy... Hope this helps!

[Tyler1144]

i dont reccomend re-housing a "speak &" toy, if you need more space, you can make a project box latch on to the side with a output VGA port in the speak, an input one on the box, that way the effects only work if the box is latched on, wich is kind of cool when you think about it, a normal toy with a vga port, then its a fully controllable speak and spell