The 1978 Speak & Spell children's language game is a toy that is incredibly sentimental to me. Apparently I'm not alone, however, considering that a mint condition Speak & Spell (or its lesser cousins, the Speak & Math or Speak & Read) still fetch upward of $40 on eBay. Broken Speak & Spells like this one are pretty common, especially considering the generations of abuse they've had to endure. With any luck you can scoop one up for around $10. One you have your case, you're going to need to find a powered portable speaker system to place inside of it. We tried using the existing speaker and amp circuit on the Speak & Spell, but it just didn't deliver the kind of audio quality we wanted. Instead, we went with a battery-powered portable speaker called the
iMainGo that was hanging around from last year's Macworld convention. We had to break out the ol' box cutter to carve some space into the Speak & Spell for the speakers to fit, but otherwise this entire project was pretty quick and painless and required only a basic familiarity with soldering.