...or is it?

I built it to replace a basic stamp 2 I had on a robot I built years ago. Its basically only a few sensor inputs and drive motors. Each motor is capable of reverse through an H bridge.

The board is your 8051 clone running at 8Mhz (programmed at 450 baud, but thats another topic) and port 2 is interfaced directly to the address ports of the ISD voice recorder chip. Port 0 just has indicator LEDs on it, and port 1 has an 8 pin header on it which will connect via ribbon cable to the existing H bridge motor controller board which is still okay.

The original speech chip used was an SPO256-2AL chip to synthesis voice, but that chip was recently fried - so I'm using this ISP chip, addressing different areas to play different sounds. This board
can be seen here :

http://www.geocities.com/adempha/CIMG0729.jpg

So, why do I call it useless? Well, while I was attempting to create a program that would cycle the address by one each time I shorted a pin to ground (for purposes of recording to each ISD location, to program the messages my robot would say) I made a bug and got the ports mixed up, etc... so it continually triggers each sound I have just recorded in a loop until the next address is cycled. Can you imagine Homer saying "Doh" nonstop while trying to look at ASM to fix it? Interestingly enough, I got some humerous combinations. The "doh" was supposed to be a sound played when the robot detects it has run into something; be glad this is the one I recorded, for the other's were... profane.

I think I'll market it as the "Annoyinator" :

http://www.geocities.com/adempha/CIMG0728.AVI