Finally, I managed to find some spare time today to connect up the audio system to a Raspberry Pi 4, which includes a simple speaker output and MAX9814 condenser mic input module. The purpose of this setup is to allow the voice recognition software (VOSK) to be installed on the Raspberry Pi, and respond to simple prompts. It took a huge amount of tweaking (and a lot of head scratching, cups of tea and chocolate) to finally resolve all the conflicts, but it seems to work, and the great thing about it is that it works offline.
The screenshot below shows a simple test that illustrates the software responding to voice prompts after I spoke several simple commands into the microphone:
I was impressed that the mic module would pick up on commands from 2 metres away, and did not make any mistakes.
The next stage of this work will be to attach the motor controller to the Raspberry Pi and install the whole module into the RixBot body. The body of the RixBot is based upon a RealRobots ‘Cybot’ body, which was originally sold as a kit through a weekly publication (see below). This is an excellent basis for a robot, as it already has geared motors, battery compartments and places for light and ultrasonic snesors built into it.
Once the Raspberry Pi has been mounted inside the robot body, and the motor controller installed, then it is ready for testing at Rix with our co-researchers.