They've just arrived in the mail, retrofit kits from www.highlyliquid.com.
Finally my Speak Toys, Casio SK-1 and Atari 2600 will obey MIDI bitches!
The kits come with little stickers "MIDI by Highly liquid" that glow green in the dark.
Attention to detail - you gotta love it!
One of the first things I ever bent is a British accent Speak & Spell, I made stickers for it renaming it "Tweak & Tell". I have a Speak & Maths lying around, still no bends on it, and I just got a Speak & Read on Ebay with an American accent.
I figured I would really like all my Speaks to speak MIDI so now what? I also figured it would be OK if it was only one at a time though, since they will all get recorded into Ableton live first, pending further slicing/dicing/splicing. Solution: Interface external and connect it to the Speaks with a 25-pin Sub-D connector and a SCSI cable I had lying around.
There are 11 wires from the interface to hook up to the Speaks so soldering the wires to the connector will not be a major drama. You know why all electronics come from Asia? Small hands!
The Speak & Maths looks super cool as it is, but the grey plastic had gone a bit brownish not unlike old computers. So I decided to spray paint it white.
To the left my new Spray Cans (Black, White, Fluo Pink)
In the middle: Dragon fruit. Special offer in Chinatown 3 for 1 Euro.
Finished paint job.
It looks like an Astronaut's gizmo from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nice!
The Speak & Read will be painted lime green when it arrives.
MIDISpeak is built, won't be able to test it until one of my Speaks is wired up too.
The PCB is quite small as it was meant to fit inside a speak toy. fairly precise soldering action needed.
Case for the MIDISpeak is shocking pink/black, the top has a piece of overhead projection sheet on it, printed with the Stikka bug. splashes of pink & white paint on the back of the plastic.
Spray painted the SCSI connectors shocking pink while I as at it! Cable is going to be black.
Speak & Maths now has a Jack out, Pitch Bend pot, Pitch Body Contact (injects hum and a kind of LFO/ringmod-ish type modulation into the sound), and a reset switch (why not) Ready for the MIDI mod!
Inside, no wiring for retrofit yet.
With flat cable hooked up to D connector. I had an old IDE cable and a floppy drive cable that I used. I recommend multicoloured flat cable though, the internal connection scheme is all jumbled up and it's quite hard to see which wire goes where.
Apparently very rarely a Speak & Math won't work with the MidiSpeak kit... like the one I have aaarrrggghhh. I thought I was going nuts I re-checked it and rewired it several times it was working kinda, but very obviously not right. Anyhow after emailing John at Highly liquid about it I tried it on the Speak & Spell, worked straight away.
Midi control at last......
