Planet Arduino

There is no shame in taking advantage of a voice assistant device, like an Amazon Echo with Alexa. Those devices are useful and can add real convenience to your life. But they lack personality and any feeling of a soul—not just because of the stilted voices, but also because of the boring industrial designs intended for mass market appeal. To inject some life into his Amazon Echo, Workshop Nation turned it into a charming animatronic robot.

At its heart, this is still an Amazon Echo and it retains all of that functionality. But the Alexa brain now inhabits a body that looks like it was made by a wacky scientist from an ’80s movie featuring robot hijinks. It was cobbled together from salvaged parts, like an old CRT TV, as well as new components. It has 3D-printed animatronic eyes based on a design by Will Cogley and actuated by servo motors. Something akin to a voice waveform appears on the CRT whenever Alexa speaks, which works by using that signal voltage to drive one of the electron beam coils.

An Arduino Mega 2560 board controls the animatronics and also monitors a Useful Sensors Person Sensor. Its purpose is to direct the movement of the eyes to follow any people in the area. The Arduino also lets the users bypass the normal “Alexa” wake word so they can ask questions starting with whatever term they prefer. Those components (the bulk of which belong to the CRT) all attach to a frame made of laser-cut clear acrylic and threaded rods.

The result is a contraption that combines all of the convenience of a modern voice assistant with the aesthetic appeal of a science fair reject.

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The video game Portal 2 is widely regarded as a classic that introduced players to several memorable characters, including one of the main protagonists-turned-antagonists, Wheatley. This anthropomorphized personal assistance robot was able to move, speak, and listen/respond to speech from a user, which is exactly what Steve Turner was trying to recreate when he built his own version of Wheatley. His animatronic device starts by waking up, and from there it selects a folder of audio files to play at random. Additionally, its AI-powered interactivity is provided by an Amazon Echo Dot via Alexa and the Arduino Cloud. 

In order to generate eye movements, Wheatley’s five servo motors are controlled by a single Nano 33 IoT, where three are dedicated to moving the eye and two move the eyelids up and down. As for storing the nearly 900 audio files, a DFPlayer Mini and an SD card hold them all for later playback by a BC127 Bluetooth audio module. This package is able to read files from the SD card and output them over Bluetooth to the Echo Dot, which in this case acts as a wireless speaker. Finally, the central “eye” can change colors via three independently addressable RGB LED rings to show Wheatley’s current status.

When put together, all these components comprise a project that closely mimics Wheatley from Portal 2 and having a way to interact with it through voice commands makes it even better. You can see this project in action below, or watch its build log here.

The post This Portal fan brought Wheatley to life as his own personal assistant appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Are you still pushing buttons and adjusting knobs with your fingers to brew your favorite coffee? If so, then this voice-controlled solution could be the next project on your list.

To accomplish this hack, a rather high-end coffee maker was disassembled and modified, adding an Arduino Nano to press buttons, along with a small motor and driver board to adjust its dial. Voice control is provided via Snips software running on a Raspberry Pi, which passes the pertinent commands along for coffee making.

When the devices around you no longer require a lengthy operation manual, but rather, require only a voice command, this unlocks an environment where technology disappears into the background, so that you can regain the freedom to spend quality time with the people you care about. That is in fact our mission at Snips, to make technology disappear.

Case-in-point: this voice-activated coffee machine. You can ask it to make you a double espresso or a flat white, to pour you some hot water or even to turn itself off.

It’s purely a demo project, but at our Snips office in Paris, we’ve grown used to the convenience, and so we wanted to make it as easy as possible for anyone interested to replicate it at home.

Code and modification instructions are available on the Snips team’s blog post, while the brewing results can be seen in the demo video below. 

If you’ve been looking for a robotic assistant with the functionality of an Amazon Echo and the cuteness of a Disney character, you’re in luck. That’s because Abhishek Singh has created Peeqo, an open-source DIY device that responds to human speech through GIFs.

Peeqo has a Raspberry Pi 3 for his brain along with a pair of Arduino Mini boards for controlling movement and LED notifications. The 3D-printed bot is equipped with a half-dozen servos, four custom microphones, a NeoPixel ring on top of his head, a camera at his chest, a USB speaker, and an LCD display.

As for voice recognition, Peeqo uses the Google Speech API for detecting the wake word ‘Peeqo’ and API.AI for responding to the query. The desktop companion can also serve as a full-fledged entertainment system that plays your favorite Spotify tunes. Ask for a song and he’ll sway to the beat.

But that’s not all. Singh even developed a Chrome extension that uses Peeqo to boost his productivity and motivate him to avoid social media while working. Once he tells it to block a certain site, the robot lets his displeasure be known in the form of a GIF.

Intrigued? You can see how Singh brought Peeqo to life on Imgur.