Working with a Raspberry Pi for my end of semester project has been incredibly

challenging and yet a very educational experience.  One of my favorite parts of this class is that there is no rigid structure to follow for

a final project in the sense that I was able to do anything.  Although the idea for this project came for the MakerLab’s ‘need’ for a voice-recorder/prompting robot, the usage of a raspberry pi was very open ended.

The major drawback of working with a project that either works or doesn’t, and has

minimal build required apart from the body, is that until it works, one has little to show

for the several hours and days invested in research.  Simply setting up the pi from my laptop as opposed to hooked up to a monitor as is it’s default, took several trial and error attempts at various tutorials.

Harina used a lasercutter to get the body of our stationary robot to be functional as well as cute.  The whole selling point of making people want to interact with a robot sitting on a desk is that it’s cute and cool.  The back interlocks with the front so that all the wires aren’t sticking out once the Bot is fully functioning, as well as easily accessible for fixing bugs.

I ended up using ssh, a command that lets you commandeer the terminal of any other computer given their privacy settings allow, and you know the password!  Our presentation goes through all the intermittent steps that I found from this project.

Nevertheless, I was able to get some things to work.

I have managed to get audio to record, save, and play back on command! The commands I used were:

I am currently working on getting the audio files to either save on another computer, or to connect the start and end of the recording process to buttons.  I will continue to work on this part of the project in between studying for finals in the next few days, though I will probably leave the MakerLab Bot in the lab by Wednesday.