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Desktop Robotic Companion

 What’s up Tinker gang. I’m back with another update to my robotic experiments.  I’ve already created a pretty stable robotic companion, but now that this companion can travel, I don’t like it super close to me because of dust and dirt. I now want something near me as I’m working on my computer, and have found a pretty cool opensource project to start from.  You may know the project as Emo on YouTube, this humanoid desktop robot rotates its body and arms , as well as displays facial animations thanks to its tiny face screen. I liked the concept and wanted to play with the designs. First, I wanted to add a way for the device to have extra gpio hats. The original design tucks the computer inside the body shell but I needed room for a microphone and any other thing I wanted to add. I thought about a few possibilities, including some kind of backpack (which I still may use later) on the bot but I didn’t like my mental designs. Instead, I decided to increase the height of the base and add
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Raspberry Pi 4 Talking Robot Car






    In a step towards building a full fledged robot from scratch, I decided to put together a raspberry pi robotic car. I didn't have any formal training on circuits or electrical engineering, so a project like this would force me to gain some knowledge. Watch it in action

 I never like making things from scratch when I don't have to , so I started with the Freenove Raspberry Pi 4 Robotic Car Kit. The kit came with four motors, a circuit board for the motors, servo, ultrasonic sensor battery holder, and camera. 

My plan was to add my logic and Natural Language code to the car to have a rolling talking bot.

Additional Components

Gpio Extender

Mic

Speaker(any small speaker will work, aux or bluetooth)

In order to create this rolling, talking bot, I would need both a speaker and a mic which didn't come included with the kit. In order to add those, it turns out I would need a gpio extender hat to hook up the power etc from the freenove setup to the additional components. 

After my amazon items came, I mounted the speaker hat, installed its code and tested it out. I liked the idea of it just rolling around aimlessly utilizing the ultrasonic sensor, but I also thought identifying a person and following them might be a needed function as well. I would need OpenCV object detection.

Power

After installing OpenCV and utilizing the object detection, I had a problem powering the system. The freenove kit powered the computer , motors, ultrasonic sensor and line following modules.  The power requirements had now increased thanks to the microphone module I had added, so I would need a small battery pack ($5 at Walmart) as a backup power supply for the raspberry pi. The raspberry pi and its hats would be powered from the pack while the robot car motors and its components would be powered via rechargeable batteries. This power change increased the fps(frames per second).

Talking while rolling 

         Noise has become an enemy. The motors at a certain speed were too loud for the microphone. I also had not trained the speech recognition to hear me in spite of surrounding noise. In order to get a good test I placed the car outside and let it roam at a lower speed while testing commands. It worked a little better.

A Smarter smart car

Soon after completing my project I came across articles on mapping the environment using ultrasonic sensors and cameras. I also came across some cool innovations as far as algorithms and machine learning models go. I’ll have to test those and let you all know how it goes.


Conclusion

Single board computers are a great way to bring a project to life. With a small amount of funds, patience and a research addiction, you can make some pretty useful stuff. I’ll make sure I update this post with videos etc as I update the code.


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