The Spice of Pi  - Blog Glenn #2

Hello everyone and welcome to Blog number 2 for the Spice of Pi.

This entry is going to lay the ground work for the software part of the Spice of Pi.  The development is going to be done in Python.  It has been a few years since I have actually used Python so this will be a great exercise to get the rust of those skills again.

Here is a rough mock up of the screen that I will start out with.  I probably won't have 16 buttons in the final display because that would over complicate the screen display.  It would be nice to have a cascading menu bar instead of buttons at all, but I am not sure how finger friendly it will be.  For sure there will be a mute speaker button to immediately mute whatever the speaker is doing.  I have found in testing (on my android phone) that if there is already sound (music) coming out of the device speak, the microphones are swamped and cannot pick out the trigger phrase.  Also, there is going to be a dedicated restart button just in case bad things happen and the system needs to reboot to get its sanity back.

This screen is also 800 X 480 to the outside of the outline box, so you can see that if the text is to be legible from more than 3 feet, there needs to be less buttons that are larger with a larger font inside.  Of course, with the Voice kit, the buttons are just going to be a fallback and everything will be controlled by speaking.

Some considerations that I need to remember:

     --> recording where a spice ends up in the tubes, and being able to spin and push up the correct one.  Also I need to make sure that the 'pusher' lines up with the bottle properly and after pushing, it lowers far enough to not snag when spinning. 

     --> as for spinning the rack, I am not sure if I will return to a known (home location) after a spice is selected, or if I will keep track of where the rack actually is and move relative to the last position.

     --> how will I tell if a spice has been removed (to lower pusher) and returned (probably only necessary if I return to a known home position)

Some nice to haves that are being looked at:

     -->connect with gmail.  The AIY assistant says that it doesn't know how yet, but is still learning.

     -->connect with sms service.  Again, assistant says that it doesn't know how yet, still learning.

     -->access to google play music.  I may have to change this so that it will play music that is directly on the sd card with VLC.  On my phone, play music seems to stream the music even though I have the albums on my SD card.

     -->search for recipes.  I am pretty sure that this will be relatively easy to do by just passing a search query to the Pi browser.

     -->YouTube cooking demo's.  Again, this will probably be easy to do.

This is another short entry, but next time there will be more to say as I hope to have the python framework for the touch screen done and working.  I also hope to have some voice control over the buttons even if they don't do anything other than print some text in my status box. I may even record a video to show how things are progressing.

Design Challenge Links:

Pi Chef Design Challenge

About the challenge

The other challengers

The kit

Terms & Conditions

Project Links:

Blog Doug 1 - The Concept

Blog Glenn 1 - AIY Voice Kit Unboxing

Blog Doug 2 - The Block Diagram and Bill of Materials

The Spice of Pi - Blog Doug 3