Alright!

The DSKorder is finally back to its former self. The replacement screen and battery charge circuit are implemented, and it's pretty much as it was before. Beautiful little thing <3

So, what better way, I thought, to celebrate this little achievement than by trying something I had been wanting to play with for a while already:

A small "DIY-TTS" on the ESP32!

I knew that a proper TTS would be a bit tough to implement, sure. But simply pre-generating a list of just the words and phrases that I need, packaging those into a "small" header-file, and adding some fancy code to play that back ... That couldn't be so hard, right?

Turns out I was quite correct, and after a good afternoon and evening of happily crunching away on some Ruby code to generate headers for audio data, I was finally left with this:

((Sorry for the vertical video >.>))

The audio is a bit quiet, but that's because the speaker of the DSKorder is TINY, and not very good for low frequencies. Sadly, limiting the audio sample-rate to a whopping 5510Hz at eight bits does leave you with only low frequencies to mess with. In my tests I turned the samplerate up to about 8k without exceeding about 300kB of memory needed, so it's definitely possible to get a better quality. Heck, add a SD card with the sound files and you could smoothly ride along at the full 44100Hz!

The system can only say words that have been pre-generated, but it DOES handle numbers fully, so it's still quite useable!

Overall, this was a very fun little thing for me to work on, and I bet it'll be useful in some situations. Maybe for a tiny screen-less multimeter with earplugs?