The Matrix Creator is an IoT-centric development board that comes with a wide array of goodies that facilitate hardware development such as an FPGA, various accelerometer and environmental sensors, IR transceivers, and even an 8-microphone array that can be used for echolocation as well as omnidirectional listening. It's this microphone array that makes the Matrix Creator (and it's smaller sibling, the Matrix Voice) an ideal platform for developing your own AI assistant! In this video, we'll look at installing and setting up Google Assistant and see how it compares to the dedicated AIY hat from a previous video.
PARTS/TOOLS:
https://www.newark.com/matrix-labs/matrix-c1-us/iot-daughter-board-for-raspberry/dp/05AC8548
https://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/sdsdqad-016g/blank-media-flash-memory-type/dp/32AC8376
https://www.newark.com/pro-elec/28-19339/adaptor-ac-dc-5-1v-2-5a/dp/51AC7144
RESOURCES:
Installing the Matrix kernel modules:
Add the repository key
wget https://apt.matrix.one/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add - echo "deb https://apt.matrix.one/raspbian $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/matrixlabs.list sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Install the packages
sudo apt install matrixio-creator-init
Reboot and install the kernel modules
sudo apt install matrixio-kernel-modules
Reboot and install the Google Assistant SDK per their instructions:
- Configure a Developer Project and Account Settings
- Register the Device Model
- Install the SDK and Sample Code
Now, you could run the Google Assistant at this point and everything will work just fine, but the fine folks at Matrix Labs actually put together a nice little application that adds color-changing lights and other little niceties to the stock Assistant installation:
Clone the Matrix Google Assistant repo
git clone https://github.com/matrix-io/google-assistant-matrixio.git
Then run the program using the project and model IDs from the SDK setup
~/google-assistant-matrixio/google-matrixio-assistant-hotword --project_id [your-dev-project-id] --device_model_id [your-model-id]
Assistant will run and respond to the standard "OK, Google" or "Hey, Google" hotwords.