So you think that text to speech is cool? What about Morse Code to Text to Speech! This is a great example of the ingenuity found in the Cornell University ECE 476 Microcontroller Design Final Projects.

“To implement our Morse Code system, we had to use both hardware and software. Since the Morse Code audio was that of a 750 Hz sine wave, we had to build a Schmidt Trigger to digitize the signal before sampling it. In our code, we used two state machines–one to detect the dots, dashes and spaces and another to determine the characters associated with the dots and dashes. To output the Morse Code, we used the Parallel D/A Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) scheme presented on Professor Land’s website. To accomplish text-to-speech, we encoded the 100 most commonly used words in English (in addition to a few extras and a silence) and stored the compressed audio in dataflash. The audio is decompressed on the fly when the word is found in the table; otherwise, the system outputs a beep. All of these parts were essential for achieving our goal.”