Voice alarms

Hadenough

Hadenough

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Supplemental to the "Worlds cheapest temperature gauge post".
I hate alarms. You know what it's like, just as you are crossing a bar concentrating on not going aground an anonymous alarm goes off resulting in general panic. Because of that I have disabled some and rely on monitoring the gauges.
However, the other post got me wondering if there was anything out there that that would provide a voice alarm. Ie; "Exhaust Overheat" - "Charging Failure" instead of a blaring buzzer. Found this but not being very techie how about Angus or some one picking it up as a YAPP thingy?

http://www.elkproducts.com/_literature_63565/ELK-124_Instructions

Or this

http://www.electronics123.com/kits-...e-recorder-playback-module-A93010-A96010.html
 
Hadenough said:
Supplemental to the "Worlds cheapest temperature gauge post".
I hate alarms. You know what it's like, just as you are crossing a bar concentrating on not going aground an anonymous alarm goes off resulting in general panic. Because of that I have disabled some and rely on monitoring the gauges.
However, the other post got me wondering if there was anything out there that that would provide a voice alarm. Ie; "Exhaust Overheat" - "Charging Failure" instead of a blaring buzzer. Found this but not being very techie how about Angus or some one picking it up as a YAPP thingy?

http://www.elkproducts.com/_literature_63565/ELK-124_Instructions

Or this

http://www.electronics123.com/kits-...e-recorder-playback-module-A93010-A96010.html
Click to expand...

A very simple way to do this would be to connect a cheap android (4.3 or above ) device to the boat via a simple IO card and the Android Accessory Toolkit and have a piece of code play MP3 recordings dependent on the state of inputs. Far simpler than hacking together lots of wires and stuff. If the device was a smartphone your phone would stay charged while used as an alarm base and when removed to leave the boat it would scupper anyone else!
 
I've been thinking the same - Ariam now has lots of different beeping things, and it takes quite a lot of familiarity with the boat to be able to recognise them. Even then, I'm not sure about some of the rarer warnings. I believe aircraft (particularly military ones) have had voice warnings for years for the same reason.

The trouble is, most of the beeps come out of electronic devices with no way of connecting them to anything else. Even if I were to solder wires onto their internal speakers (and compromise the waterproofing), the same device often has multiple different alarms that I would want to distinguish.

Pete
 
prv said:
I've been thinking the same - Ariam now has lots of different beeping things, and it takes quite a lot of familiarity with the boat to be able to recognise them. Even then, I'm not sure about some of the rarer warnings. I believe aircraft (particularly military ones) have had voice warnings for years for the same reason.

The trouble is, most of the beeps come out of electronic devices with no way of connecting them to anything else. Even if I were to solder wires onto their internal speakers (and compromise the waterproofing), the same device often has multiple different alarms that I would want to distinguish.

Pete
Click to expand...
You could have a log of fun with that...

"Darling, it is getting a bit shallow"

"Oh Captain, Chief Engineer here, it’s getting f&&&ing hot down here"

"Bridge, galley here, there is a strong smell of gaz down below"

"Helm, GPS here, steer 024 degrees warp speed 3"
 
Hey, I like that idea. Suggestions for a suitable announcement for yesterday when I got down to 0.4m coming out of the Orford Bar. "I told you that was the wrong transit!"
 
More seriously. PRV and Elton I was thinking more of the simple alarm triggers like exhaust temp, raw water flow, charging, rather than anything from plotters or radar. The Elk products one looks promising, I'll investigate further.
 
or perhaps...

"Daddy, I can smell something burning but it's not the bacon. Pop down into the engine room will you, while I speak to those lovely Coastguard people and my agent."
 
I would love an alarm in a sexy womans' voice saying " Darling, it's getting a bit shallow ! "

However we tried this in the advanced Hawk jet in the 1980's, I listened with interest as the ladys's voice ( thought to get more attention from a male pilot ) said on start-up, just like turning igninition on in a car when one runs through the red lights, various things like " starter fire, starter fire, spin, spin, eject eject ! "

This didn't do a lot to calm me on my first fast jet flight; the Test Pilots called her ' Moaning Minnie ' and turned her off, the system was soon binned.
 
SmartPhone IO architecture is not to easy to access...

But you would use a RasPi provided you can get the inputs. But if you can get the inputs you could just have an led panel and a single alarm.
 
The digital fuel gauge that I built also monitored the RPM. It had two alarms: fuel low and loss of alternator output, distinguished by sounding Morse codes via a piezo sounder. It would certainly be possible to make a device that monitored several devices and gave a voice alarm, using nothing more complicated than a PIC microcontroller and a memory card, each alarm being triggered by a 0V input to the device, and representing a "track" on the card.
 
Sorry what I really meant was you can't just solder a wire onto USB cable and read it's state. So you will need something like an arduino and the bits to program it. You need to build something. You could either connect to that with USB or Bluetooth. Whereas with a RasPi you could simply connect hi - Lo wires to the GPIO header. Cheaper than buying an arduino programmer? Or have I missed something...

Would u want ur phone close enough to hear clearly its alarm message from the cockpit? Or would u put it in the nav table and wire a remote speaker?

When you have used ur phone to make a call and not reconnected it by mistake do u get no alarm.
 
If I was ever daft enough to let my phone talk to me, no doubt it would yell things like ' you don't want to be settting off now, you've missed the tide,' & ' you don't want to anchor here, there's a better place over there '

I have discovered an incredibly useful app, whereby I can talk to people 1:1 in real time without playing space invaders to get there - I think this one may catch on.
 
Can't see an app that let's people communicate 1:1 catching on. Next you will be suggesting we could have devices that are 'wireless' and people can talk into some box and someone hear them with another box miles away... ...enough of this science fiction...
 
sailed deep sea on a steam ship fitted with a voice alarms, used to drive everybody daft, very loud Nippon lady and no means of switching off the alarm except for about 30 seconds, only way to cure was get back into the operating range.
 
nigelmercier said:
It would certainly be possible to make a device that monitored several devices and gave a voice alarm, using nothing more complicated than a PIC microcontroller and a memory card, each alarm being triggered by a 0V input to the device, and representing a "track" on the card.
Click to expand...

Right, but that's the easy part. The hard part is getting (and distinguishing between) the inputs for "depth too shallow", "waypoint reached", "AIS CPA too close", and "anchor dragging" (invariably because I forgot to turn the anchor alarm off before departing!). Those at least are the common ones that regularly go off and cause momentary panic on Ariam.

Pete
 
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