How Would You RoadTest the Matrix Voice

Matrix voice is a good add on to the RPi. There are many such hats but this one is the best of it due to that FPGA.

The advantage is we can make a home automation system, a google home for ourselves or make our own assistants with things like snips.ai

It is also smaller than the creator. It also does not have esp32 moreover the sensors are lacking in the simple version. The one with esp32 can be more helpful as it can be programmed standalone and so we can also add functionalities which are difficult with FPGA or simply not possible. Even the creator does not have ESP32 a very common chip to program for standalone operation.

But being small, and the awesome projects and manufacturer support we can create cool home automation projects.

HA is quite common and also has many exixting solutions so we need to be creative to think where else it can be used? Probably in some alarming system or something else.

We can test it by creating an all-in-one project as that is what the board is capable to do and we can also experiment with FPGA which have good documentation.

Vimarsh

For those that want to re-program the on-board FPGA (not needed to work with the Creator but it can be done), a heads-up:

The Xilinx ISE IDE that you use to work with the Spartan 6 is not compatible with Windows 10.  You need to have access to an older Windows version or use the virtual machine with ISE pre-installed that Xilinx released.

Hi Randall,

When I saw this device I had two thoughts.

One was to use it for direction finding for thunder to alert someone about the direction of an approaching thunder storm.

The other thought was for tracking individuals in a meeting room. I am assuming that you could have everyone identify themselves and use the microphones to map each person. You could then copy statements made by each person during the meeting using the previous location information to identify the talker without needing to do voice comparison. You could also use the voice comparison to track the movement of a specific speaker within the room.

DAB

It has been a long while since I last tinkered with psychoacoustic masking and audio steganography, but reading about the Matrix Voice awoke some of those ideas.

I'm thinking the Matrix Voice could be adapted to perform real time audio steganographic decoding. Not that the development effort to achieve real time steganographic decoding would be trivial, but it seems at first blush to have the necessary computational horsepower.

On another front: How about a near real time translator that converts spoken word in one language into written text in another language?  Maybe most of the heavy lifting could be done by Google services with the Matrix Voice handling digitization, formatting and upload of voice data.  Just a thought.

Both of these ideas go well beyond the scope of a Road Test, but would make fun and challenging multi-month projects.

Matrix voice is a very good add on board for projects using voice interfrace with raspberry pi . It contains good microphone and we can use it to make project something for home automation and try the different sensors inbuilt in it .The standalone version would be helpful where there is need of low cost project.

I would like to road test it by making a personal voice assistant for us using raspberry pi and matrix voice and use the data of inbuilt sensors in it  and try to put my hands on fpga.

Aabhas Senapati

Wait a minute. ISE? Do people even use it anymore? 

You have to, if you want to develop for a Spartan 6. What would you use?

Aah I have never used a spartan 6. I've used a spartan 3 with ISE before. So like, I assumed since 6>3 it would be running on Vivado.

Well that's news to me

It would be interesting to add some directional baffles and use the device for determining sound source direction.  With haptic feedback, it could be a good aid for the deaf.

Scott

I don't have any esoteric needs, but I have 2 mundane applications that have been bugging me for a long time:

1. A long range microphone I can locate at my large screen TV and use for Skype calls while sitting across the room. (A wired mic running across the living room just doesn't cut it.)
2. A mic for my camera that will equalize my voice volume as I blog - no matter how far away I move (up to 8 feet). Wearing a wired mic often gets in the way while doing a demo. Even a wireless Lavalier is cumbersome and distracting in a video.

My attempts to solve these applications so far have been dismal. (I am open to suggestions)