Applications and implications

For this assignment we need to answer some relevant questions about our final project.

What will it do?

PACO is a digital companion platform allowing to develop for example a productivity assistant sitting on one's desk, a virtual baby sitter for kids, or a friendly companion for teenagers.

It will be able to sense the presence of his user, interact with it using voice, lights and touch, remind him appointments, suggest actions and record video and audio notes.

Who's done what beforehand?

• Nabaztag http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabaztag
• Chumby http://www.chumby.com

What materials and components will be required?

• PLA Rolls white, green, yellow and red.
• Raspberry PI B Rev (512Mb ram)
• USB Camera
• Two micro-servo motors
• Adafruit OLED 128x64 Screen (http://www.adafruit.com/products/326)
• ITEAD Studio Ultrasonic Sensor HC-SR04 (http://www.robot-italy.com/en/itead-ultrasonic-ranging-module-hc-sr04.html)
• FR-1 PCBs and parts from the inventory used to build the SquareDuino (or any other Arduino ATMega328P clone) see Output devices page.
• WS2812 LED Strip

Where will they come from?

• PLA can be bought at any store, I'm using Plastic2Print
• Raspberry is distributed in Europe by RS-Online
• Servo Motors can be purchased among others at Hobby-King, any micro servo will do
• Adafruit
• Seeed Studio
• ITEAD-Europe

How much will it cost?

• Printed parts ~5 Euros
• Servo motors - 15 Euros
• Adafruit OLED - 15 Euros
• Ultrasonic - 3.66 Euros
• USB Camera - 9 Euros
• LED Strip (9 leds) 4.50 Euros

Total parts: 51 Euros Raspberry PI: 30 Euros

What parts and systems will be made?

Physical parts:

• 3D Printed Case
• Laser cut wooden Raspberry box
• Motors control and mechanism for pan-tilt camera
• Stickers for decoration

Software:

• Web interface
• Data acquisition from Ultrasonic sensors
• OLED screen control board
• Python API for controlling the digital assistant

What processes will be used?

• 3D Printing for the Digital Companion case

• PCB Production for the SquareDuino

• Laser cutting the digital companion box

• Vynil cutting stickers for customizing the Companion looks and branding the box

What tasks need to be completed?

Many hardware features of my original project plan have been dropped as they are already implemented at some level in the Raspberry PI Hardware and require only some programming on the Linux side.

These include video and photo acquisition, audio playback, audio recording, network connectivity.

I already implemented most of the additional boards used in the project during the semester.

They now must be re-engineered and integrated for fitting the digital companion form factor.

My choice for controlling Servos, OLED screen, LED Strip and Ultrasonic sensor is to reuse my Squareduino Arduino-compatible board.

The Python API and Raspberry web interface still needs to be implemented.

Finally the 3D printed and laser-cut cases must be designed and built.

What questions need to be answered?

The biggest concern is to be able to provide a fluid speech synthesis and recognition. While speech synthesis is feasible on the Raspberry PI, my idea of continuous speech recognition requires a cloud server, since the Google Speech API I was planning to use has been shout down since I started the project.

Also making the system easy to program is a challenge, especially since I want any kind of user to be easily customizing their digital companion with new tasks.

What is the schedule?

• May 22-26 Complete the boards
• May 27-30 Build the case and integrate all the components together
• May 31-June 2 Program API and test

How will it be evaluated?

A preliminary evaluation will be carried by making the project present itself to the class during the project presentations. A further test will be producing a working digital companion for productivity enhancement to be shown during the Fab10 conference.