Re: Including tonal output on a multimeter?

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 04:07:31 GMT, John Doe <jdoe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

D from BC <myrealaddress@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:45:20 GMT, John Doe <jdoe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


A long time ago, I made a Tonal Voltmeter for low-voltage circuits.
Pretty simple, mostly just input from the circuit to a CD4046
connected to an earphone. The idea is to turn small voltage levels
into the corresponding tonal output. Like 0 V would be a very low
tone and 5 V would be a high tone. When I was doing electronics as a
hobby, I enjoyed adding stereo output to the tonal output, but
that's another subject.

I always thought that tonal output could be easily added to a
multimeter. Just occurred to me you guys would know. So that's my
question. It would require a mini 1/8" or whatever jack for the
output, or just use a speaker. I guess you would add a
voltage-to-frequency converter to the output that drives the LCD
display driver or the circuit before that?

I will be more than happy to explain further if I'm not being clear
about the question.

Thank you.




Some DMM models can be USB connected to PC's.
One idea would be to write a PC program to do V to F conversion
using the USB data.
The PC soundcard would make the sounds.

Go nuts and play wav's for different voltages..

That probably would be far from instantaneous tonal changes provided
by a voltage-to-frequency converter, especially if you're using
PlaySound. I don't know about low level sound output in Windows.

Or is that just nonsense.


I think the spoiler would be a slow DMM USB data rate..
Not because of the interface (USB 2 480Mbps) but due to the DMM ADC.
There are very fast AD converters available but dunno if they are
being implemented in DMMs.

The USB interface and the PC and the software run time would all
probably be much much faster.


D from BC
.

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