A talking, listening bee: my first hardware project
Exploring what a toy that kids get to talk to could be
For EDUC237 (Learning, Making, Crafting and Creating), we built a bee that speaks and listens to students. It's practically a microphone, a speaker, and a Raspberry Pi Zero that streams audio to and from a computer.
The idea
The user can speak to the bee, and that speech gets streamed to a computer, transcribed, and stored. The computer could run a (local) LLM and stream responses back to the bee. The vision is a tutor toy that kids can talk to and get answers from I explored running the LLM directly on the hardware, but the Raspberry PI we had didn't have enough RAM.
My first hardware project
I had absolutely no experience with hardware before this. I learned to solder and to actually build something physical from a pile of components. I learned to use an amplifier, speaker, mic, and a Pi. The most challenging part was streaming audio to and from the Raspberry PI with its limited RAM.
What I learned
- How to solder and assemble real hardware from scratch.
- How to setup and do audio sreaming