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For YEARS I have thought voice output on a meter was obvious. the last thing I want to do is look at a screen while my hands are holding probes somewhere delicate/dangerous/fiddly.
I see that speaking multimeters are starting to be a thing. These just read out the display value and unit type ("11.34
Volts DC") but it made me think (sorry)
I also think these type of meters could be so much better. They should have a verbos setting generating more detail: "10.3v DC with 1mV white noise", "5v DC offset 3v peak to peak 50hz sine wave" that short of thing.
Ultimately (and I would have called this fantasy 10 years ago) a dedicated small inbuilt LLM where you can say, "Are there any transients?" and it says "I see a 2mv 5v spike every 430 uS" . I am starting to see that sort of limited/dedicated and LOCAL LLM working on things like HomeAssitant so hopefully in the next 5 to 10 years. (Online just doesnt work consistently enough for this sort of thing)
In some ways this starts to replace, in a limited sense, some other systems such as digital storage scopes and signal analysis.
It has memory and so you can say, "Did you see a CAM bus encoded packet after I said 'go' that instructed the right headlight to turn on?" That requires storage and knowledge of the potential packet protocols but I have digital signal analysis devices that understand many protocols already...
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'Hey multi- summarise the spectral components of this signal', 'What's the distortion of this sinewave', 'Does the voltage dip when I do this', Excellent idea! [+] |
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For a safety-critical application, I'd recommend a more deterministic piece of software, that doesn't hallucinate. It can still use a trained neural net for voice processing. |
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[+] Canon had a simple voice control system in the nineties. It could recognise a few tens of words. It could do a better job if you trained it to your voice. It could run on a typical commercial microcontroller. You could mount the microphone straight onto the circuit board, which could be better than adding extra buttons. |
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I don't think we ever thought of sticking it on a multimeter. That is an ideal application because you usually are using all your hands and eyes to keep the contacts where you want them. So you might say...
"Volts?" and it would tell you (and display)
"Record ... Stop" and it would measure the signal and report the major AC components and any transients. This would let you record the pure signal and ignore the bits when you were fiddling to make a contact.
"Contact" tests for conduction and beeps. |
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All this is easily possible without a LLM. You can't ask it "Is this what I would expect to see on the line sweep of a PAL colour TV?" But you might get it to talk to your phone, and then anything could be possible. |
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When I wanted my broadband set up the engineer had to come to the house to physically connect the line. He could not find where the pre-existing line came in to the master socket; but the slave sockets in the house were obviously not connected to the master socket or the external line. He had a machine that plugged into the socket and pinged and then measured the time of the echo, and said "well this line is about five meters long" so we paced out five meters in every direction to see if we could find the other end of it (the disconnected master socket was boxed in behind built-in cupboards). |
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I would be disappointed if this machine could not do similar echo-location tricks and produce a nifty map of the circuit |
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Ooo! With pocmloc's suggestion, this is getting really interesting. |
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Let's have a quick sketch of what the thing might look like. I have just gone and got my multimeter. It has a big numeric display, and a big rotary switch. It has a socket that is only used for measuring ten amps. I don't remember ever wanting to measure current. |
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HP made a voltmeter with an early LED display in the early seventies. This was a thin, hand-held gadget with one terminal on the tip of the body, and the other emerged as a wire that you could clip to the board earth or use with a hand-held probe. If we start with the design, we have got rid of the big rotary and the plugs for the cables. |
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Have a small matrix display so it can show numbers or oscilloscope-like traces. Have a couple of buttons so you can go through a menu using your thumb. Have a microphone and a speaker. The speaker can go beep if you have a connection, or go oo-eeEEEeee-oo if it detects volts. Have a loop with a flat edge so it can detect magnetic fields or measure current by induction. It should set its own ranges, so it will expect huge volts, and quickly go to smaller measurements provided the connection is stable. Have a USB connection for charging and doing clever stuff. Have a small computer and memory so it can be programmed to do other stuff. Get it to use some of the volts for recharging if the on-board capacitor is low. The thing will now be credit-card sized - we would probably have to make it bigger to avoid losing it. |
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[instert Futurama "take my money" GIF here] |
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"Hey Multi -- confer with Kitchen, how much longer on dinner?" |
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This multimeter is beginning to look like a mobile phone. Make a voltmeter probe with A/D, fuse, and earth connection, with a USB to connect to the mobile and get power. Or use wireless if it has power, and protect your phone: that gets rid of another cable, and means you can put the display where you can see it. |
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You exchange your cheap display on a hardware store gadgets for a high-resolution phone display where you could scroll through an oscilloscope trace, serious memory to log data, and touchscreen. Have a separate probe for magnetic fields and current. |
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"This is very interesting I can autocorrelate the waveform, or add it to another one, or decode the CANBUS information content, or tell you the rms value. Is this part of a project you are doing or something you are just interested in?" |
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//Make a voltmeter probe with A/D, fuse, and earth connection, with a USB to connect to the mobile// |
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One of the main features of the digital multi meter is that big clunky rotary dial in the middle of them, even the expensive ones. Behind that, is lots of physical switching* - that's what enables the same meter to measure from very small to very large Voltages and currents. Every now and then you might want to measure a small voltage and accidentally probe a couple of hundred Volts of the opposite polarity, smoke and noise often result. For this reason you don't want the meter connected by USB to your phone - it makes mistakes potentially much more expensive , Bluetooth preferable I feel. |
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Without that rotary dial, I think you'd need a fairly complex series of robust relays for the "smart" component to switch through various modes, it would necessarily have to work from most cautious to most sensitive. |
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*which is why it's easy to make a knock-off. Nowhere to hide any secret sauce. |
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Easy solution to that is to have a big clunky rotary dial in the middle of your smartphone |
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That's a pleasent full circle for phone design. |
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