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Multi Meeter Streaming Serial Output.

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Zagroseckt:
Well i hope i'm asking this is the right section.

Here is what i'm trying to do.

Capture a serial stream from a meeter with a micro for conversion to speech.

This is the situation.
I'm Visually impaired and im a tinkerer i make small projects small circuits and mod mod mod the everliving crap out of almost every thing i own.

Well one of the most anoying aspects of having poor eyesight aside from how long it takes me to plug in a split molex and bouncing around the room when i burn my nose on the soldering iron is reading a meeter.

After slowly lining up the probes getting them well in spot i end up moving so much to try and see the meeter i loos the connection i'm trying to test. so i want to rig a meeter to speak it's mind when i click a foot pedel

ofcorse this can be setup to log as well but bla i want speech :)

Since my old meeter has finaly lost calabration so much that it's usless i'm in the market for a new one and this time i'm going to get a good one (100-200)$ range now that cost is going to hirt . and hirt hard for me this meeter is going to have to last me at least 10 years to be worth it.

so i'm hoping you folks out there can help.

I need a meeter that i can tap a serial line on. somthign that spits out it's readings prety fast
as you can guess i don't mind modding it if i have to.

The string is important.
it should contain.
[setting|range|reading] or more.
the spoken result (altho i'll probably shorthand it) will speak something like this.
(foot click)
{speech}-- A C One hundred fifteen point three two three volts
or
{speech} Amps one point 4 Milly amps.

All that can be parsed form the string even if it's spitting out decimal data like 1,4,9,1.9369000

I just need a good meeter that i know will last take a few Whopses off the table and i can tap a data line out of.

A plus if the data tap is powerfull enough to run an opto

oh ya :) it can be one way data no return data needed. all the other stuff is handled by the micro.

PS.
dont know wich micro i'll be using yet it's a tossup between arduino and pic right now.

PPS my old meeter was modded to run a HUGE wall mounted display wich was keeling over in it's own write as it was allso a clock / caller ID and ran constantly.

And the method i used on it was just sniffing the signals sent to the meeters lcd itself so no real data.

saturation:
This is definitely a field where electronics can help.

Many DMM from Uni-T and Agilent, at the least, can output their data into USB, and from there to an ascii/unicode file you can parse.  How they pass the file varies, so you'd have to customize it for the meter you choose.

A quick way to parse this file maybe to use the Windows built in text-to-speech converter, it won't be pretty but it will be functional very quickly.  Its available from Accessories folder.

Zagroseckt:
I'm familiar with the windows TTS API and i'm not going the pc route i'm going to use a micro to keep the meeter portable.

not sure how to read a USB chain quite that way with the micro tho :( so i still need somthing that can be red form a standard serial port. if possible that is.

And links to the meeter and or a full model would help pleas. so i can look it up.

Psi:
since all the speech you need is just fixed set of words you could record someone saying the words you need.
 
you'd need...
* mcu  (atmega/arduino should do fine. ive used them before for playing speech audio)
* the meter serial port (get a meter that has serial out. usb only meters will be too tricky)
* max232 or simlar ic if needed for meter serial output voltage converstion
* a sd card socket / breakout board
* a dac chip plus small audio amp

there is example code for reading a fat32 sdcard with a atmega mcu and probobly most others too.
WAV file are pretty easy to understand and to streem out the data to a dac ic. if ya hard code it for one type of wav. eg 8bit 11k mono ya can just ignore the file header and go straight to the audio samples, they always start at the same place in the fine

two thing to note
1.  use a sdcard smaller than 2GB.  some sdcard libraries dont like the bigger ones as they use a different standard.
2. when recording audio. Record it at the same bit/sample rate you are going to use on the mcu. it will sound way better than recording in high quallity and then using software to downsample to the same lower quallity

Mechatrommer:

--- Quote from: Psi on January 06, 2011, 01:52:58 pm ---WAV file are pretty easy to understand

--- End quote ---
can i get a reference for wav data format?

to zagro. my uni-t 71a can spit out serial data through ir to usb, hacking the ir led lead should be possible, but i never know how much kbps the data is sent. all i know so far is the data is spitted at 1-2 Hz only, so when you hit the pedal, the longest time you have to wait for the answer is 1 second. hope that helps.

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