ICStation's $5 SU-10A Packs an On-Board Unisound US516P6 for Offline Voice Recognition Work
Low-cost module offers local voice processing, but documentation is sadly thin on the ground.
ICStation has begun selling a $5 module designed to add voice control to projects without the need for a network connection, building on the Unisound US516P6 microcontroller: the SU-10A.
Designed for solder-free installation to speakers, a microphone, and a host microcontroller, the SU-10A — brought to our attention by CNX Software — looks to simplify the creation of offline voice control systems, offering on-board processing without needing a connection to a remote voice recognition server.
The heart of the module is a Unisound US516P6 microcontroller running at 240MHz and offering 242kB of static RAM (SRAM) and 2MB of flash, alongside a floating-point unit and accelerators for digital signal processing (DSP) and fast Fourier transform (FFT) operations. A 3W monaural amplifier is brought out to a solder-free speaker connector, and a second connector supports an electret microphone.
Two UART connections are included, one for a serial console and the other for connection to an external microcontroller. What isn't included, oddly, is any way to access the Unisound's general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins — meaning that an external microcontroller becomes a lot less optional if you're actually wanting to trigger anything other than audio playback with the gadget.
Sadly, documentation on programming the module is thin on the ground — but ICStation has begun selling the part for $5.03, a discount on a claimed $6.99 retail price, making it a low-cost target for experimentation.