I’m excited to finally introduce the next software release for the Arduino Talking Spirit Level project. This project has proven extremely popular and there were several feature requests, chief among them the ability to store the settings in EEPROM so that they are retained on power off.
Version 2.0 of the software is a major update which adds EEPROM storage for the four key settings, those being the axes to be spoken and the decimal point value. If the software is used on a fresh board, default values are chosen for these settings that are the same as before. When a value is changed, it is stored in the EEPROM.
This update also fixes several bugs. These include arbitrary ‘zero’ characters announced in the menu, and the broken feature allowing reference angles to be set.
I have had some requests to add an LCD display to this project. This is something I would like to do but there is a caveat. The timers that the Talkie speech engine uses interfere with the use of an LCD display, and getting the two to cohabit nicely is nigh on impossible.
I’ve had similar issues with buttons and encoders, hence most of my projects using only a single control button where ideally multiple buttons would be implemented. It is my hope that another text-to-speech library can be found or created that is more flexible. An alternative is reading speech files from an SD card, but this requires extra hardware. Perhaps there is a speech synthesiser on a chip that I’m unaware of that could be used as a compromise.
Grab the files below. As always the package includes all necessary libraries. I welcome feedback, comments and suggestions.