Making a Smart Speaker - Part 4

In this exciting episode of "Making a Smart Speaker", we'll work on the AI that will do our bidding. We're already using some massive neural networks and pretrained models just do do voice recognition, but here is where we get to be creative about our AI. What do we want it to do? How freeform should we allow input? And, most importantly... how the hell are we going to do hotword detection?

A Futile Attempt At Bending a DVR To My Will

One of my favorite places in the world is Gateway Electronics in St. Louis. They're an electronic part and surplus store that never fails to delight with their collection of old electronics. The last time I went, however, I found something newish. It was a DirecTV HR23-700 HD DVR box. I looked at the back and it had several really interesting ports: HDMI, eSATA, and two ethernet ports just to name a few. At $10, it was too good to pass up, so I bought it to see what I could do with it. I don't have any immediate plans for this right now mainly because I don't know what's inside. But we're about to find out.

GoPro Karma Stabilizer Teardown

I crashed my drone. Really bad. It literally snapped the Gimbal arm in half. So I had to order another one because I was stupid and I didn't get the extended warranty because I didn't think I'd ever fly that close to low hanging trees. Sinking this much money into a GoPro drone is worth it, though, because I've had nothing but good experiences with their products (although they're not great at figuring out what to do when upside down on the pavement. But, like my dad says, there are two kinds of remote pilots: those who have crashed and those who are going to crash. I guess technically I'm in both categories now. The point is is that I have a broken gimbal and I can take it apart now because there is a less than 0% chance I can fix it and I already have another one.

State of the Blog - Year 2

It has been exactly two years since I started this blog. In the past two years it's become something completely different than what I expected it would be, and I'm not upset about that at all. It's actually been a big source of growth and distraction for me, and I really like that.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 3

The Orange Pi Zero came in the mail yesterday, so I guess we're ready to move on to the next part in the design of the smart speaker: audio input and output. We won't cover any of the intelligence behind the AI right now because all I want to do is get audio out of the Orange Pi and into the speaker at a reasonable volume, and maybe get voice recognition to work. By the end of this, we should have something that can play music files and maybe transcribe what I say. We'll see.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 2

In this installment of Making a Smart Speaker, we're going to work on the non-lowend (mid-high range) audio output. I was disappointed when removing the lowpass filter didn't make the subwoofer output all ranges (the acoustics of the shape are too subwoofer-like), so we need to add another speaker to make this worth anything. In this part, we'll do just that.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 1

Smart speakers are the "next big thing." You can tell because Apple started to make them, and they have such a good track record with the next big thing (not recently, but whatever). There are DIY solutions popping up all over the place, so I wanted to try and make my own as much from recycled electronics as possible. I have the things to make this happen (for the most part), so let's make this happen!