You Must Construct Additional Pylons

Description

Turn on Pylon light: "YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS!"

Turn off Pylon light: "My life for Aiur!"

Details

The heart of this project is the Geetech voice recognition module. In conjunction with an Arduino Nano and a relay, this little light-up Pylon can be voice controlled. The voice recognition module operating manual can be found here.

The operation of this design is very simple. You record a couple phrases, enable the voice recognition module, and when it detects a certain phrase, it will send out a hex value corresponding to it. In this design when "YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITION PYLONS!" is detected, it will signal to the Arduino which will drive a transistor gate. This will power up the relay coil and complete the circuit to power the pylon. The phrase "My life for Aiur!" will disengage the relay.

Geetech Voice Recognition Module Review

I'm going to briefly review this ~$30 module for anyone interested in this or other options. I used the microphone supplied with the device, so no doubt it would be better with a higher quality mic.

(Pretty poor soldering job on the IC, a few solder bridges. Luckily many of the pins aren't connected to anything!)

• Pros: This was easy to use and get started quickly. There was good documentation, with 15 slots for commands. The design of the commands make it easy to integrate with a project and control adding/deleting commands.

• Cons: The length of command was limited to about 1-1.5 seconds, so you are limited to very short phrases. In fact, my command for turning the light on was cut a bit short, so the phrase "you must construct additional" all that was needed to turn it on (so I put a short delay before turning the light on to make it seem like the entire phrase did it, shhhh).

It doesn't seem sophisticated enough to pick keywords out of sentences either. For example, I made the keyword to be "pylons", and when I said the line "you must construct additional pylons", the module would not pick up on the word. The module would be looking for the silence before the word as it begins recording as soon as you are prompted to start speaking.

In summary, this is a good little module for a decent price if you are looking to control things with simple and short commands. If you're looking for long commands with sophisticated recognition, this isn't the device for you (which isn't a surprise given the price-point).

Making an enclosure

It's about time I finally put this thing in an enclosure! I decided to use an ATtiny microcontroller and a smaller 5V relay for this.

Now I can put this compact case anywhere, maybe even as a Christmas tree topper!

"You must construct additional Pylons!"