Talking Energy meter

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Mithun_K_Das

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Making a energy meter has become a old style. So I want to add a new feature. The meter will speak. But I don't know what will be the best way to make it. Should I use MMC (Micro Memory Card) or anything else?

Need suggestion...
 

For short speech or sound effects when quality isn't very important I use simple PWM at low sampling rate. Even at 4K rate the quality is acceptable. I use a PIC 18F series device and an external memory, either I2C or better still SPI (because it's quicker). For sounds <6 seconds there is enough space inside the smaller PICs internal memory without need for an external one.

Brian.
 

Actually I want to add voice. That means, it will announce the ratings as audio. Say meter reading is 168KWhr then it will speak, "Your Current Reading is One Sixty Eight Kilo Watt Hours, Total bill ... etc."
 

Actual memory usage is (length of speech * sample rate) in bytes where the length of speech is in seconds and the sampling rate is s/sec. I found the highest sampling rate that was acceptable while not stressing the PIC was around 4K/sec so a 1Mbit NVRam would hold about 4 minutes of speech in total. The biggest problem was making the audio samples (.WAV) as most audio editing programs don't allow you to go that slow.

I made doorbells that sounded a klaxon then said "Prepare to repel boarders" (borrowed from a well known sci-fi starship captain!) when visitor arrived. People found it very funny!

Brian.
 

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