Planet Arduino

Speech commands are all the rage on everything from digital assistants to cars. Adding it to your own projects is a lot of work, right? Maybe not. [Electronoobs] shows a speech board that lets you easily integrate 255 voice commands via serial communications with a host computer. You can see the review in the video below.

He had actually used a similar board before, but that version was a few years ago, and the new module has, of course, many new features. As of version 3.1, the board can handle 255 commands in a more flexible way than the older versions.

Although the board can handle 255 commands, it only listens for 7 of those at one time, which is an odd limitation. However, the older board had even stricter limits where you could only listen to one of three groups and each group had 5 commands. With the new board, you can pick any 7 of the 255 commands to be active at once. You can then replace some of the 7 with other commands based on context. For example, you might listen for a main menu command and, based on that selection, listen for a different set of second-level commands.s

The interface is either serial or I²C. We couldn’t help but think that if you could listen to 12 or 15 commands at once, you could have a set for listening to numbers which might be handy. Maybe version 4?

You train the commands using a microphone with an interactive wizard-like setup. The eventual target for this is a robot, but for now [Electronoobs] is just lighting up LEDs on command. But it looks very easy to use for whatever purpose as long as you can work out the limit of 7 commands.

It is harder to do, but you can make an Arduino process speech by itself. Even easier, with a bigger processor.

[Diyguypt] may be an altruist to provide the means for people who can’t manipulate chess pieces to play the game. Or he may just have his hands too busy with food and drink to play. Either way, his voice command chessboard appears to work, although it has a lot of moving parts both figuratively and literally. You can check out the video below to see how it works.

The speech part is handled by an Android phone and uses Google’s voice services, so if you don’t want Google listening to your latest opening gambit, you’ll want to pass this one up. The phone uses an app that talks to the Arduino via Bluetooth, which means the Arduino needs a Bluetooth module.

The Arduino controls what amounts to an upside-down 3D printer. Instead of a hot end pointing down, the mechanism has an electromagnet pointing up. A small washer in the base of each chess piece makes it susceptible to the magnet’s motion. The electromagnet is required to let go of a piece before a move to a new position. It is possible that a small servo moving a permanent magnet closer to the board for a move and away from the board to reposition could do the same job, though we suspect that could be tricky.

We’ve seen this before, often with a Harry Potter theme. We sort of prefer a more obvious chess robot, but that’s just us.

Robotic hacker [Andrea Trufini] apparently likes choices. Not only does his robotic arm have six degrees of freedom, but it has a variety of ways he can control it. The arm’s software can accept commands through a programming language, via potentiometers, an infrared remote, or–the really interesting part–through spoken commands.

The videos don’t show too much of the build detail, but the arm is mainly constructed of laser cut plywood and uses an Arduino. Hopefully, we’ll see more particulars about the build soon but for now have a look at a similar project.

The software (myrobotlab) is on github and looks very impressive. The Java-based framework has a service-oriented architecture, with modules that support common processors (like the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Beagle Board) along with I/O devices (like motors, sound devices, and that Leap Motion controller you just had to buy). As you might expect from the demonstration found below, there are speech to text and text to speech services, too. Like a lot of open source projects, some of these services are more ready for prime time than others but that just means you can contribute your hacks back to the project.

You could build some pretty powerful robots with a framework like this. How powerful? One of the services knows how to play chess.