This our the first blog in the Pi Chef Design Challenge. The “our” is because glennvanderveer and I will be collaborating on this project. This year I want to try using collaboration as a way to get new members more involved in participating. We don't know how this will play out, but right now Glenn is keen and I am keen to see if we can make it work. Glenn is a new member, but has lots of technical experience especially in software, so technically it should be a good fit. I think for now we will be doing separate blogs – just linking to each other's blogs until we find some better way to make it look like a cohesive project.
I wouldn't say I have a great passion for cooking, but I definitely like to eat and this is a great opportunity to see if technology can improve the experience in the kitchen. Our project has several key objectives:
The hardware objectives are:
- to make a motorized spice dispenser carousel driven by a Raspberry Pi (which is why we call the project the Spice of Pi)
- to build in a 7” touch screen that can display information that may be useful in a kitchen, such as recipes and Youtube cooking videos
- to implement microphones and speakers to provide voice recognition, audio feedback and audio accompaniment for the video
The software objectives are:
- to implement voice recognition so that the system can be operated hands-free while cooking
- to implement Google Assistant, providing full hands-free access to the internet and all other Google Assistant services
I will try to be very detailed in what I blog about because my project partner will need to know exactly what he is up against. This may mean exposing a lot of the dead ends I typically go down during a project, but hopefully others will find them entertaining.
The components we intend to use for the project include a Raspberry Pi 3 of course, but will also have a Google AIY Voice Kit and a 7” touch screen.
The AIY Voice Kit, which is a combination of Artificial-Intelligence and Do-It-Yourself, makes this more than just an IoT project, it is really a foray into the Internet of Intelligent Systems. Google Assistant is only going to get smarter with time and this is a really great opportunity to start understanding its potential. I can't wait to ask this system a bunch of odd questions.
When I first started using Raspberry Pi's I never anticipated implementing anything with so much capability on a Raspberry Pi platform. It is very exciting to think we can probably get all this functionality working in a couple of months.
It promises to be lots of work, but the plan is to develop a system that is very functional, very educational and a lot of fun to use.
It looks like the spice carousel will hold up to 25 bottles of different spices in 2 rings. The RPi3 will rotate the carousel to bring the selected spice closer and raise the spice bottle selected all by voice command or touch.
This crude layout was drawn with CAD to see if a 25 spice platter could fit on my 3D printer.
A few more mm of build space would be very useful....
My next blog will outline some preliminary mechanical design and specify some more components.
Our proposal was not successful in getting us the project kit (that is my fault), but we spent the effort to set up a collaboration and want to see it through anyway. I think Glenn will do some sort of unboxing of some parts he procured. He might even do an early demo at some point as he is way ahead of me on the software side of the project.
Design Challenge Links:
Project Links:
Blog Glenn 1 - AIY Voice Kit Unboxing
Blog Doug 2 - The Block Diagram and Bill of Materials
Blog Doug 3 - Spice Jar Lift Mechanism
Blog Glenn 2 - Firmware Considerations
Blog Doug 5 - Platter Rotation Mechanism
Blog Doug 6 - 3D Printed Platter Parts
Blog Doug 7 - Main Drive Assembly
Blog Doug 8 - Working Carousel
Blog Doug 9 - Google Assistant
Blog Glenn 3 - GUI Exploration
Blog Glenn 7 - First Pi Platter Action
Blog Glenn 8 - Pi Voice Control Platter
Blog Glenn 9 - Code Expansion Woes
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