This week I gave the project proposal presentation on Monday, and I ordered a respeaker to start configuring the hardware. I already have a raspberry pi 3 B+ so I spent some time downloading the libraries we will need to the raspberry pi, to test downloading and running code on the raspberry pi. I also started to work on the design for the code that will run Raspberry Pi. The flow of this code will need to handle listening for audio on the microphone, sending this audio in real time to be processed, then transmitting the audio to the AWS server. For this, I found we need to listen for audio on the microphone on its own thread separate from audio processing, we also need to run the server listen and accept on its own thread. I found 2 ways we can do this in python, 1 by using the library thread or 2 by using the library asyncio. I am leaning toward using the asyncio library since it is more helpful in creating io routines and also for networking. One main challenge here is that we will need to tell the respeaker to output audio potentially during the time that it is listening to audio. I will test this functionality on the respeaker when it arrives here. I also researched how we can send the input audio to be processed, we can use a python numpy array or a .wav file, so this format depends on how Mitchell will filter this audio, and what the format needs to be for his script. For the server code, I am planning on using the python socket library and a udp connection. The packets will be compressed audio and the metadata containing the direction of arrival (DOA) of the audio.
My progress is on schedule this week. For Monday I will create a system diagram of the software on the raspberry pi, and continue working on the design presentation slides. Next week I will write the server code that goes on the AWS server and start to test the raspberry pi connection to the server.