bettarini Engineering and Precision Systems Talking Clock

• The system is using an MP3 shield from Sparkfun, mounted on my own Arduino-compatible main board.
  

Operation

The device uses 4 push buttons that can send 4 different events. If any button is held pressed for more than 1 second it will send a different event. The total number of button events is therefore 8. A keypad timeout will return to page1 (clock).

A traditional cron file in the SD card can be edited to setup various types of events.

FEATURES

• 3 time zones
• 3 functions: clock, timer, temperature
• 3 speaking voices, each can be set to a different language
• Relay control

CLOCK

• Clock spoken by female voice.
• Current time announced every 5 minutes.
• Time setting is done in UTC time.
• Automatic adjustment at day light saving changes.

TIMER

• Timer spoken by male voice.
  When activated the voice announces alternatively every 5 seconds the time elapsed and the time remaining.
  After timeout it keeps announcing the time elapsed since the timeout every 5 seconds, until stopped.
• The timer settings is persistent.

TEMPERATURE

• Typically setup to announce the ambient temperature every 30 minutes.
  5-meter cable to external sensor.
  Multiple sensors can be easily fitted.

RELAY

• Cron-file events to turn the relay on/off