Build Time

Alistair Harris - Sat 9 May 2020, 9:44 pm
Modified: Sat 9 May 2020, 9:44 pm

Progress Update

The last two weeks have been absolutely chaotic!

I have combined two journals into one because I was constantly chopping and changing prototype ideas and adding and removing documentation. This is going to be everything I have worked on over the past two weeks and the last minute changes I need to make before the due date for the demonstration on the 11th May.

Between now & 11th May

This week from Thursday onward will all be completely focused on building the prototype's core functionalities based on the plans below.

  1. LED light up + voice initiation on startup (can be mocked)
  2. Voice to text
  3. Text to compare to correct answer
  4. If answer = text correct answer, if not incorrect
  5. Have a visual indicator on correct and incorrect guesses.
  6. Have an audio indicator on correct and incorrect guesses.

I have had no experience with Arduino before just using a Makey Makey when I did a previous prototyping course. I found that with that the programming is the difficult part compared with the connection of the circuit. I expected that this would be the same and I was correct. I started by working through the examples in the instruction book that came with the Arduino to get a feel for how it worked. It was actually not hard to pickup at all and it only took me 10-20mins to complete the first example problem. The online IDE for Ardunio is great because I can go back and forth from my laptop to the desktop for working on it.

I thought that the LED's were a great way of showing correct and incorrect answers so I used red and green as people always recognise red being wrong and green being right as traffic lights work like this.

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This wasn't hard to connect up as it just requires the LED's to go to the specified spots from the Arduino code then back to GND.

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The tutorial helped with this as there is a lot on how to connect up LED's. The difference here was that I won't be using the Arduino to input to turn the LED's on and off, instead I will be using C# and the microphone from my laptop.

The next part was the hard bit and that was working out how to to use C#'s speech recognition reference to input and turn the LED's on and off. I did some research on this and there was a lot of content online about this but nothing specific to what I wanted. I used bits and pieces from online tutorials and Youtube videos and then started creating my own version suited to what I was trying to do. This took most of the time for the development of the prototype. In the end the main functions weren't that complex but I couldn't have figured out the voice synthesizer parts on my own.

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These are some links that I used to help me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZjLd2ifxhY

https://www.instructables.com/id/Voice-Activated-Arduino-Bluetooth-Android/