Maker Todd E. Stidham has discovered a brand new use for a compact sound impact board developed to be used with microcontrollers: making a talking voltmeter that gives the look of rising panic the upper the measured voltage will get.
“Since I developed my BuzzKill board, I’ve mainly simply stored it mounted on an Arduino,” Stidham explains. “I used to be doing a very separate challenge the place I wanted some sensor readings, utilizing an LCD for output. And it immediately dawned on me that, for the reason that BuzzKill board was already there, it may converse the outcomes as effectively for hardly any additional code. So I rapidly cobbled collectively a demo.”
The BuzzKill is Stidham’s open supply sound impact generator — not an audio playback board, he notes, however a tool that dynamically generates sounds from user-supplied parameters. “BuzzKill is most helpful as a peripheral for a microcontroller,” the maker explains. “Utilizing both an I2C or SPI interface, a controller can ship instructions to supply an infinite number of sounds. Primarily, BuzzKill acts as a compact musical instrument producing sounds on demand. It incorporates a full-featured additive synthesizer, able to emulating an assortment of instrument sounds or creating completely new ones.”
Relatively than music, although, Stidham’s newest demo of the board generates synthesized speech studying out a voltage of a related circuit. Because the voltage rises, so too does the pitch of the voice — giving the impression of rising panic from the gadget.
The supply code for the challenge is on the market in Stidham’s Reddit publish, whereas the BuzzKill {hardware}, firmware supply code, and instance tasks are all out there on GitHub beneath the permissive MIT license.
