Micro-Seven talking voltmeter

Mike Iwata, president of Micro Seven, a small test and measurement company up in Hillsboro Oregon, sent along a press release about their VM10 multi-meter that has a voice output. What is cool is that you can record your voice or anyone else’s so that it needn’t be a scary HAL 9000-sounding voice telling you your circuit is about to smoke. Price is $495. Another 50 bucks will get a telephone interface. Plug a phone line into the VM10 and it will pick up an incoming call. The caller can then type in a DTMF command and the VM10 will voice a reply with the measurement data. It also has a RS232 interface. As Dick says:

Entire voice segment including numerical number, sign, over range, measurement mode, and measurement range are programmable or recorded into VM10 by using a microphone circuit in VM10. Voice data may be uploaded or downloaded between PC and VM10. Because voice segments may be in your own voices, its language may be in any language like English, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, German, etc.

The VM10 records your own voice and uses that to call out voltage, current and ohms measurements.

As a former consultant and small businessman I always pull for these cool little companies, just like I pulled for Bantam Instruments a while back. Now that I have written my wireless article, due out in a week, I can appreciate how cool Bantam’s 2.4 GHz spectrum analyzer is—there is a ton of interference up at 2.4 GHz and you need something to help you figure out what is going on.