Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone, Spring 2020: Ashika K, Abha A, Jade T
On Monday, I fixed a couple issues with the CAD of the body frame. I’ve also started the CAD for the head frame and figuring out how to redo the arms now that I don’t have access to a 3d printer. Initially, my plans involved …
On Monday I cleaned up my audio input/output code in order to work with Ashika on integration. I turned my code into easy to call modules, documented it, and documented all the installs needed to run it. I also started writing code that will setup …
This week I accomplished the following tasks:
At this point, I have finished all the components of the storytelling algorithm. I just need to do some more error handling, and if I have time, improve certain features (like antonym generation). I think it is ready for the first demo day, so I am very much on track.
Next week, I will first work on cleaning up the code and writing documentation, just so that it is easier for my teammates to understand what the programs do as we integrate. I will also finish grammar correction for nouns. After this, I will finally make some templates, as well as document how to make templates. If Abha is ready, I can start integrating my part with the text displays.
What we did Jade and Ashika worked on integrating the storytelling program with the audio input/output on laptops. Abha started building a cardboard prototype of the robot frame and started working on the eye displays. Risk Management As we mentioned in our statement of work, …
The first part of the week was spent on figuring out how to deal with the coronavirus changes, since that majorly affected my part of the project. Since things were changing every day (wrt CMU, Techspark, where I would be, etc), it took me a …
This week I worked on getting the simple fill in the blank interface working on the Raspberry Pi. I have the audio input portion working, however have not got the audio output portion working. This is mostly because I have been having trouble figuring out how to get audio to play directly to the speaker as opposed to the built in sound-card. I also ran into some issues with file formats where I assumed that the text to speech package could output .wav files, but it only outputs .mp3 files. Additionally, I found out that the built-in raspberry pi sound card can only support sampling rates of 44056 Hz, 44100 Hz, 48000 Hz, and 96000 Hz.
I’m behind because I didn’t continue any work on pitch shifting and didn’t get the audio output part of the project working.
In the next week I hope to start working with Ashika on integrating our two portions of the project as well as finish getting basic user input program working on the pi.
The events this week did not affect the software side too much. The whole system latency requirement has been scrapped, but that is mostly due to integration problems. For the software component, I actually managed to get the program running faster after switching to using …
The major change to our design is that we will now be constructing our robot with common household materials, such as cardboard and wood. This is because Techspark has shut down and we no longer have access to laser cutters, which we needed to construct …
During the earlier parts of this week I worked on writing the design report.
After the design report was submitted, I talked with Ashika to figure out how the ML algorithm would output dialog to the text to speech portion of KATbot. I then worked on writing a program that reads a templated story line by line, prompts the user for input whenever needed, takes that input and saves it. The program finishes by asking the user if they want to hear the story that they made while interacting with the program. The program works moderately well, however, there are latencies of around 1- 2 seconds from when the user responds to a query.
Below is a line by line text view of everything the TTS algorithm says. Right now, “generated” is being used to fill in words that the ML algorithm would provide.
Currently I am a little behind where I would like to be because I need to start working on the pitch shifting algorithm, as well as getting the program I wrote running on the pi.
I will not be working this upcoming week because it is spring break and our group planned slack time around spring break. However, for the week after spring break, the main things I plan on working on are getting the program I wrote running on the pi and working on the phase vocoding algorithm. If I have time I will work with Ashika to integrate the short storytelling interface I wrote with the ML algorithm that she has been working on.
We have no changes to the existing design, and are currently on schedule. First, we worked together to finish the design report. Then, we split off to work on our individual tasks. Ashika started the user interface program, which integrates user error detection, synonym generation, …