AT A GLANCE
SUNY POLYTECHNIC
Client
Expertise
• RASPBERRY PI
• LINUX
• WINDOWS 10
• PYTHON
• SPEECH RECOGNITION
• FABRICATION
Date Completed
APR. 2022
The Color Of Words Art Expo
I was invited to create an exhibit for the Suny Poly Art-Tech "Translation" Exhibit by my professor Michelle Sammon. It was part of a class exercise for which the expectation was just to apply for the show, and or use artwork that was either already existing or artwork that was created for the show specifically, I chose the latter. For my exhibit I chose to have an interactive piece, that allowed the user to press a button, say a word, and have a color translate from speech to light.
COMPLICATIONS
I had to create the project from scratch, there was no direct avenue of approach for connecting a microphone to a raspberry pi, then connecting the pi to the google speech recognition cloud, and then sending an RGB code to a LED light strip. I also needed to make a pedestal specifically to house the computer and prop up the "cube" that would light up, since I would be drilling and cutting holes into any pedestal that may have been provided.
SOLUTIONS
I was able to find a "Pi Hat" that allowed for a simple hook up to the raspberry pi (a pi zero w) and using a program called piGPIO or "PIGS" for short, I got a connection to the lights, sending sine wave format commands via a custom script, I was able to change the lights. Integrating the speech recognition to this was another story, most of the speech recognition tutorials are out dated with the advent of alexa and google home, and software/hardware has been updated a lot since then. After going through several revisions I was finally able to integrate with python 3.8.1 as the base language and used another custom written script to translate the spoken word (using an array, grabbing only the first word spoken in a phrase) into the first, median, and last letter. Each letter was then assigned a value, 26 over 255, with a minimum of 50 so as to not make the light dim, and if a "letter" had a value higher than the other two, it was given an additional 100 in value with a max of 255 so as to increase the saturation of the color. I then was able to connect the button, build the pedestal, make a 5 sided plexiglass cube (fun), and attach it all together. Inside the piece is also a screen that is left disconnected, but can be used along with a mini wireless controller to troubleshoot if needed. Once finally hooked up to the Suny Poly Wifi, the exhibit has worked flawlessly, and we even made (via Michelles suggestion) an interactive board that users could write down what word their color was.
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