now i need your help: i’ve build a “self-contained” sound board around the raspberry pi 2 to put a software on it that listens and babbles like a child (i.e. not really speech recognition but more like based on speech sounds).
now i want to but the hardware into a nice casing and i checked ebay for a couple of really old transistor radios. here are my top three (in no particular order):
simple, clean silver radio, not too robotic but rather reduced in its design.
blue and silver, almost too perfect shape for a robot head.
yellow casing, silver and gold, with a clock.
which one should i choose? i really love all three of them, what you do think?
okay, i have a samsung charger for the first 10.1 inch tablet they had, usb 5.0v, 2.0a. the analyzer however shows 5.37v when nothing is connected. i think that this is even above the rasperry pi’s spec / acceptable voltage, but i have a 1.5m amazon (“premium”) usb cable and i assume that the voltage drops along the way to a non-lethal level.
i’ve connected the edimax wifi usb plug and a tiny mouse and an external, laptop sized mini-keyboard as well as a 7 inch hdmi display (touch controller not connected):
raspberry pi setup with keyboard, mouse and display
during boot up and seeking the wifi connectivity, the pi draws 0.33a. same after booting to the linux terminal.
next up: adding my sound board, but only the amplifier connected though the 5v rail of the pi’s gpio. the loudspeaker does a slight whizzing sound, but not hearable from 40cm away. the pi now draws 0.36a after booting when the pi isn’t playing a sound. phew! first boot with the sound board connected survived, so it seems that the wiring is ok or at least not destroying the pi 😀
okay, so i soldered a cut-off usb plug from a recycled old memory stick to the usb edge connector of the prototyping board and plugged it into the last free usb port of the pi.
sound card connected via home made usb cable
after boot up, the amp meter shows 0.38a and after a while (linux working background?) it settles around 0.40a, which to me means that the sound card actually is connected decently on the power side.
linux command aplay -l actually lists one usb audio device, yay!
second thing i notice is that there is a acoustic feedback loop when i turn up the volume without playing a sound. interestingly, the power consumption also goes up to 0.57a and the little rainbow colored square appears on the screen (indicating that power supply is shakey afaik).
and now the final test for today:
arecord -D plughw:0,0 -f cd ./test.wav followed by aplay ./test.wav
so recently i re-started my activities around the raspberry pi since their upgrade to a quadcore at the same price. i want to do a couple of things with this little fellows, for example hook up an asus xtion (think of a stripped down microsoft kinect) for 3d vision or at least depth processing for the trashbot or his siblings. another cool thing would be to experiment with sound and speech-recognisers as my dream over the last 20 years was to experiment with phone level systems, i.e. a speech recogniser that doesn’t translate human acoustic language into text or words but to their “sound representations” (i.e. how the words sound written down without orthography).
for this purpose i’m building the “babble pi” which should be a “self contained” audio i/o system on the rasperry pi and certainly i’m an addict to minimalism so Continue reading →
