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DIY Microprocessor Sound Level Meter Demoed At MIT
An anonymous reader writes "A Piezoelectric Sound Level Meter was demoed at MIT's Battle of the Bands last month, borrowing its display from the do-it-yourself USB LED marquee that was the subject of a previous Slashdot story. This video tutorial describes in detail both the analog electronics plus the C code that runs the system. If this is your first experience at the intersection of digital and analog systems, don't be scared!"
FIRST!!111!!
Mod parent up!
The intersection of analoge and digital is interesting. When I first learned of the Berger-Liaw speech recognition system (October 1999), I was simply stunned. 10 years on, and the technology has mostly made it to the US submarine service and NSA. It bested everyone elses stuff by at least 30:1. It could easily pick out multiple speakers at once, and dozens in a noisy room (like at a cocktail party), or beside an aircraft engine. Digital technology and large digital neural networks with hundreds of nodes couldn't keep up, to the half-dozen to dozen nodes of the analog system. The difference being the temporal information still present in the analog systems, lost in the digital ones. I can't ramble to my computer, so this technology is still tightly under wraps, but perhaps like touch screen technology, it just needs a patron (like Apple, or me), and then bang, the government says 'its not just for us anymore...damn!'