Speak to me, breathe
March 10, 2009 – 3:25 pmA while ago I picked up a small speaker without realising that I’d need to solder wires to it; this weekend I corrected that mistake by obtaining a soldering kit from Maplin. Whilst there I also picked up a “familiar tune” electronics kit after spotting it had a more impressive looking speaker in it, figuring I could always use it for soldering practice if the robot couldn’t use it.
Despite being a decade out of practice at soldering and lacking a clamp, I managed to get both speakers wired up. Testing confirmed that both work, but I’ve gone with the larger one for now as extended use of the smaller one produces the distinctive smell of burning electronics! Although I’m concerned that the big magnet of the speaker might find its own way to cause havoc.
The first .wav files I was able to locate on the host PC were from Left4Dead, which proved entirely too creepy. Sticking with Valve, here’s a video of the object tracking code updated to use some clips of the Portal sentry turrets. There’s a known issue with the terk qwerk board clipping the start of audio files, so I’ve thrown in a 0.3second delay; this seems a bit long, so I’ll hopefully be able to tweak it to more closely match speech to actions.
Expense-ometer: (approx, lost the receipt!) £534 so far.