Alexa, but it has a face 🤖 #esp32 #desktoprobot #voiceassistant
Hardware: 1)Board: waveshare ESP32-S3 1.46” Oled (this board has an onboard mic and speaker and a few exposed GPIO’s… I’m using pins 12 &13 although pin one is also available. The rest will not work unless you give up the touchscreen or mic/speaker). 2)Servos: GH-S37 micro servos (these can right straight off the 3.7v lithium… along with the esp so no boos circuit needed). Xiaozhi free ai service. It surprisingly fast and easy to use. I used their example code to flash the esp, and injected my own vibe coded (shameful, yes) scripts to add a face and servo movement. The example code already tracks status like ‘listening’ ‘speaking’ and ‘slew’ so I just hooked that into movement and animation. Problems I ran into: Qi charge module connects to the onboard USB-C. I found out this board will not turn on from a battery simply being connected and you must hit the power button. My work around is setting it on the qi charger powers it on automatically, after that you can remove it and the battery suddenly works. Problem 2: On boot, the servos seem to create interference (maybe voltage drop or rail noise) that prevents the mic from coming online. Workaround there is to add a switch to disconnect the servos. Once it boots, activate servo switch and everything works. Future plan is to redirect the Xiaozhi ai backend to my own local ai and home server, then use this guy as a type of ‘alexa’ smart home device to turn on lights, check weather, etc.