This week I worked on the microphone and receiving an output on it. Since the regulators on the PCB were not working properly, a workaround was needed in order to test if the microphone would work properly. Eventually I settled on using an esp to read the data as well as another ESP acting as the power source. Here is the setup
For some reason, the esp would not power on if the pins were on the pcb and was receiving power from my laptop. As a result, I just connected the GPIO pins that correspond to the microphone onto a breadboard. After some testing in Arduino IDE, I was able to get an output when the microphone was spoken into. Some concerns are that since it is omnidirectional, it may have a hard time differentiating voices. However, given the proximity the person has with the pendant I don’t think this will be a huge issue. We will see shortly though once the text to speech side of things is implemented properly.
Since the microphone is surface mount, and with the aforementioned uncertainties,, we have ordered a new microphone that we will be using for the demo. This next week, we hope to have the text to speech trigger created as well as customization preferences to be working properly.