Schlagwort: Voice Commands

  • Adjusting office chair height with simple voice commands

    Adjusting office chair height with simple voice commands

    Reading Time: 2 minutes

    A month ago, ElectronicLab modified his office chair with an electric car jack, giving it motorized height adjustment. That worked well, but required that he push buttons to raise or lower the seat. Pushing those buttons is a hassle when one’s hands are full, so ElectronicLab went back to the workbench to add voice control capabilities.

    ElectronicLab was using an Arduino Nano to control the electric jack motor in response to button presses, so he already had most of the hardware necessary to make the system smarter. He just needed the Arduino to recognize specific voice commands, which he was able to achieve using an ELECHOUSE Voice Recognition Module V3.

    That voice recognition modules supports up to 80 voice commands, but ElectronicLab only needed a few of them — just enough to tell the chair which direction to move and how far to go. The module came with a microphone, which ElectronicLab was able to attach outside of the 3D-printed enclosure where it could pick up his voice.

    But there was still one problem: the movement was very slow. The jack was designed to lift a car, so it uses a high-torque motor with a 10:1 planetary gearset to drive a hydraulic pump. ElectronicLab didn’t need that much torque, so he welded the planetary gears to give the motor a direct 1:1 ratio. Sadly, that was a mistake. The hydraulic oil can’t flow fast enough to keep up, so the motor pulls way too much current for the driver.

    Still, the voice control was a success and so ElectronicLab can simply swap out the motor.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZaVKgvQFiE?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

    The post Adjusting office chair height with simple voice commands appeared first on Arduino Blog.

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  • Controlling a bionic hand with tinyML keyword spotting

    Controlling a bionic hand with tinyML keyword spotting

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    Arduino Team — August 31st, 2022

    Traditional methods of sending movement commands to prosthetic devices often include electromyography (reading electrical signals from muscles) or simple Bluetooth modules. But in this project, Ex Machina has developed an alternative strategy that enables users to utilize voice commands and perform various gestures accordingly.

    The hand itself was made from five SG90 servo motors, with each one moving an individual finger of the larger 3D-printed hand assembly. They are all controlled by a single Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense, which collects voice data, interprets the gesture, and sends signals to both the servo motors and an RGB LED for communicating the current action.

    In order to recognize certain keywords, Ex Machina collected 3.5 hours of audio data split amongst six total labels that covered the words “one,” “two,” “OK,” “rock,” “thumbs up,” and “nothing” — all in Portuguese. From here, the samples were added to a project in the Edge Impulse Studio and sent through an MFCC processing block for better voice extraction. Finally, a Keras model was trained on the resulting features and yielded an accuracy of 95%.

    Once deployed to the Arduino, the model is continuously fed new audio data from the built-in microphone so that it can infer the correct label. Finally, a switch statement sets each servo to the correct angle for the gesture. For more details on the voice-controlled bionic hand, you can read Ex Machina’s Hackster.io write-up here.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mc9VOxiwgo?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

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  • HeyTeddy is a conversation-based prototyping tool for Arduino

    HeyTeddy is a conversation-based prototyping tool for Arduino

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    Programming an Arduino to do simple things like turn on an LED or read a sensor is easy enough via the official IDE. However, think back to your first experiences with this type of hardware. While rewarding, getting everything set up correctly was certainly more of a challenge, requiring research that you now likely take for granted.

    To assist with these first steps of a beginner’s hardware journey, researchers at KAIST in South Korea have come up with HeyTeddy, a “conversational test-driven development [tool] for physical computing.” 

    As seen in the video below, HeyTeddy’s voice input is handled by an Amazon Echo Dot, which passes these commands through the cloud to a Raspberry Pi. The system then interacts with the physical hardware on a breadboard using an Arduino Uno running Firmata firmware, along with a 7” 1024 x 600 LCD touchscreen for the GUI. Once programmed, code can be exported and used on the board by itself.

    Those wishing to learn more can check out the entire research paper here. 

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUtUtIBBJ74?feature=oembed&w=500&h=281]

    HeyTeddy is a conversational agent that allows users to program and execute code in real-time on an Arduino device without writing actual code but instead operating it through dialogue. This conversation can either be based on voice or text (through a Web chat). Commands spoken to HeyTeddy are parsed, interpreted, and executed in real-time, resulting in physical changes to the hardware. For example, the “write high” command configures an I/O pin to behave as a digital output with its internal state set to high (e.g., a 5V logic level), making driving an LED possible. Hence, the user does not need to write any code, compile it, deal with errors, and manually upload it on the hardware.

    Furthermore, HeyTeddy supervises the user’s choices, preventing incorrect logic (e.g., writing an analog value to a digital pin), guiding the user through each step needed to assemble the circuit, and providing an opportunity to test individual components through separate unit tests without interrupting the workflow (i.e., TDD functionalities). Finally, the user has the option of exporting the issued commands as a written code for Arduino (i.e., an Arduino sketch in C++, ready for upload). 

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