I was looking for a engine sound generator for my war planes and traditional helicopter and realise some comercial options are arduino based. There are already available github open source projects for this porpose, it should not take much effort to include a sound generator feature in ardupilot. Besides being a fun feature it also opens path for remote voice communication. The driver for the speaker is a simple diy task that could be driven by an analog pin output from the ardupilot. I believe this is a very interesting topic to discuss.
Thank you!
I read this post a few hours ago and must admit that I kind of rolled my eyes. But I keep coming back to it because it’s a pretty novel, neat idea, and perhaps there are indeed applications beyond the model RC world. I wonder, though, if such a thing might best be driven by a companion board rather than on the flight controller board itself?
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This Adafruit Audio FX Sound Board can store 11 sounds which can be triggered with digital inputs. I’ve used it to make a jello-activated keyboard for a granddaughter’s birthday. But, you could easily put various engine sounds in it.
I do not know if you already found this:
I build a version of it for my sons Landrover Defender Crawler and it works really good. Calculating all the sound effects/overlays takes quite a bit of processing power, so I do not know if this would work running on the FC.
The other thing is the volume. I use two stripped down PC speakers and it is almost to loud indoors, but outside a few meters away, it gets quiet fast. I guess it would only make sense for take-off or landing, when the aircraft is close by. But the aircraft would still have to carry all the weight without a benefit during flight.
Hello @count74,
That was the project that trigger this idea of porting the sound generator to the Ardupilot. The H7 processor has 400Mhz, I believe it should be more than enough to run this.
The H7 has plenty of horsepower to do audio processing if that’s the only task. The problem is that the primary task is controlling an aircraft in 3D space by fusing multiple sensor inputs to multiple closed loop control algorithms and providing output to flight control surfaces, motors, props, etc, all while monitoring remote control inputs and providing telemetry back to the user. In my oversimplification of the FC’s duties, I probably missed a few things that it’s doing in parallel.
At a glance, anyway, it seems that processing layered audio in conjunction with all of that probably isn’t a good idea, especially since it’s entirely unrelated to vehicle control. Instead, a companion board could take MAVLink messaging from the FC and use that to determine the output sound type, volume, playback speed, etc, without risking vital control loop interruption on the main control board.
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I have the Matek H7 running the latest FW and almost all demanding features are running, including fft, harmonic notch, telemetry, soaring, logging with fast sampling, etc when looking to the flight logs the PM load never go above 30%. I assume there is plenty of room for more.