I began the week off spending time fine tuning both our proposal slides and the actual presentation. Because I was the one presenting, I added some notes for myself and practiced for a few hours prior to actually presenting. After this, I spent the middle of the week researching and coming up with a parts list, specifically focusing on the voice to text components of our project. I began with research on specific lighting components and searched through digiKey for their respective parts lists. Along with DJ, we determined that 950nm was sufficient for testing and had good directivity and ability to modulate frequency. After, I did research on open source models such as Open AI Whisper and Vosk, before ultimately choosing Vosk as the most promising V2T software to begin with. I then made the first proof of concept Vosk model that translated chunked up audio files into English test. This was a good enough proof of concept that we felt comfortable selecting Vosk as our primary focus for open source V2T. Following this, I did research on how to make V2T compatible on raspberry pi with some of DJs modulation specs. I have now been researching and playing around with the pigpio library for RPi and its ability to potentially be our way to accurately modulate eyeR.
My progress is on or ahead of schedule. Most of my scheduling for this week was regarding determining the parts we would use for our project. Not only did I complete this, but we put in order forms and have begun making Proof of Concepts for some of our system components. Mainly, the V2T software seems easier to use than we initially thought so we (DJ/I) are in a good position on that. We are still waiting for confirmation of our ordered parts but hoping that those are also as expected.
Next week, I hope to begin integrating the V2T software and the Rpi. If our microphone is here by then, I would like to get the RPi to take in microphone waves and convert to text. Otherwise, I would like to deliver a similar system but with the microphone replaced by computer audio files. I would like to have the software on the RPi for live translation as well. From here, I can then (not necessarily next week) coordinate with DJ and start to mesh together software components.