Candice the personal assistant robot

[L67GS]

As far as I remember, a generic 720p USB web-cam consumed around 1.5Watt (5V/300mA).
It seems to be worth to measure the voltage on the VBUS of the PlayStation Eye board.

I powered one up on the bench, current draw wasn't consistent, it jumps around up to about 350ma. I powered it off the power bus on the microcontroller board and all is well.

[L67GS]

As far as I remember, a generic 720p USB web-cam consumed around 1.5Watt (5V/300mA).
It seems to be worth to measure the voltage on the VBUS of the PlayStation Eye board.

I checked the current draw, it's not consistent. Lows around 150ma, highs around 350ma.

[L67GS]

Frustrated with speech recognition I needed a break so I did more research and ordered the GPS module, it's a NEO-6M knockoff so 9600 baud UART and draws about 40ma so I can switch it with a bjt. It's NMEA-0183 so I shouldn't have any trouble in code, knock on wood.
My acceleration module is ADXL345 and draws about 23 µA, operates both I2C and SPI so I figured on using SPI. I haven't looked too close at data handling because there's a bunch of existing libraries and such online for it.
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20210205_120843.jpg (321.43 KiB) Viewed 284 times

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Now back to speech recognition.....uhhg.

[mad_ady]

What are you doing with gps on an indoor unit? Implementing "Find my Candice"?

[L67GS]

What are you doing with gps on an indoor unit? Implementing "Find my Candice"?

I'm planning on taking her around with me, which is why I took this form factor.
There's a few things I'd like to do with gps,it would be neat if she knew where she was, and she can use it to report the time.
I'm kind of fantasizing about something else though, since the GPS will know precise time and location to a few feet, and she has a 3 axis accellerometer I may write her a function to track my runs at autocross.

[L67GS]

I got the Candice AI taking reliable input from Julius using a new version of the "API" (quotes because it's very crude) on my computer and am currently resolving an issue with C++ ifstream on the C0.
So... she should be able to hear me in a couple of days.
Today Candice is dismantled and strewn across the bench in my lab with a battery capacity tester running a test on her battery pack while I install a esp8266 wifi module and write a little code for her battery monitor.

[L67GS]

Speech recognition is working with Julius and a somewhat limited vocabulary. It's a bit buggy, and I have to revise the code some because not all of the functions are ready for speech recognition.
A limited vocabulary meant I had to get creative, things like instead of hearing 1,000 Candice hears 1 & 000 so I need to tweak stuff like that yet so she sees it and turns it into 1000 before converting it to a double variable.
I also elected to do a temporary esp8266 installation until I know it works properly.
If the esp8266 works Candice will control it to where she'll boot and if no network is available she'll use a bjt to turn it off so it isn't wasting power...
Still a lot of testing but for the first time since I started speech recognition 6 months ago an end is in sight.
Oddly enough the method I'm using was one of my very first attempts and almost all this time was invested exploring other methods.