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Getting Started

Adafruit Playground is a wonderful and safe place to share your interests with Adafruit's vibrant community of makers and doers. Have a cool project you are working on? Have a bit of code that you think others will find useful? Want to show off your electronics workbench? You have come to the right place.

The goal of Adafruit Playground is to make it as simple as possible to share your work. On the Adafruit Playground users can create Notes. A note is a single-page space where you can document your topic using Adafruit's easy-to-use editor. Notes are like Guides on the Adafruit Learning System but guides are high-fidelity content curated and maintained by Adafuit. Notes are whatever you want them to be. Have fun and be kind.

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  • By retiredwizard

    Your own TTS engine for the Fruit Jam Spell Jam app

    Overview

    The Spell Jam app on the Fruit Jam is a twist on a classic electronic toy. Check out the Spell Jam learn guide to learn all about it.

    By default, Spell Jam uses the Amazon Polly Text-to-Speech (TTS) service to create audio from the entered text. While Amazon's service can be used for free during a trial period, it does require an AWS account.

    If you'd prefer not to create an Amazon AWS account, you can instead run a local TTS server on your home network using open-source models like KittenTTS, Kani-TTS or eSpeak.

    This playground will walk you through the steps required to run a local TTS server on your network and configure Spell Jam on your Fruit Jam to use that server instead of AWS.

    Installing a Text-to-Speech Model

    There are two TTS AI models that the Spell Jam local backend works with:

    • KittenTTS - lightweight, will run on a Raspberry Pi 4/5
    • Kani-TTS  - newer, but may require an Nvidia GPU. (as of 2/2026 Kani no longer works with server.py)

    Legacy software TTS application:

    • eSpeak - Initially released in 2006, a free and open-source compact speech synthesizer.

    Before install any of the TTS systems, create and/or activate a dedicated Python virtual environment.

    python3 -m venv venv
    source venv/bin/activate
    Humanoid robot whispering to Fruit Jam running Spell Jam
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Getting Started

Adafruit Playground is a wonderful and safe place to share your interests with Adafruit's vibrant community of makers and doers. Have a cool project you are working on? Have a bit of code that you think others will find useful? Want to show off your electronics workbench? You have come to the right place.

The goal of Adafruit Playground is to make it as simple as possible to share your work. On the Adafruit Playground users can create Notes. A note is a single-page space where you can document your topic using Adafruit's easy-to-use editor. Notes are like Guides on the Adafruit Learning System but guides are high-fidelity content curated and maintained by Adafuit. Notes are whatever you want them to be. Have fun and be kind.

Click here to learn more about Adafruit Playground and how to get started.