Mar 2023 Update
This month, I shipped a handful of changes to Maria. These sporadic updates might be he norm for a while--I really enjoy working on Maria, but need to punctuate work on this with other projects to stay sane-ish. I'll also note that I pushed a bunch of random one liner tweaks directly to main in the past couple weeks. That's not my proudest moment. I was prepping to be on a quick segment of the Tom's Hardware Raspberry Pi Cast and was finding Maria a bit laggy in the days just before.
In addition to some very small improvements to the code (and the aforementioned tweaking of parameters in my SoundDevice input stream), I've set Maria up with a new dictionary skill as well as updated her 3D printed case.
The goals for the case update were to better fit Maria's cone and hardware, as well as to move to a more modular construction (the walls are now printed separately) for cheaper iteration. I still encourage everyone to get creative and make their own base, as this one is still imperfect and a bit costly to 3D print.
If you do want to make the updated case, 3D print:
- Base for Raspberry Pi and peripherals (PLA FDM)
- 3x standard walls for the base (PA12 Nylon SLS)
- 1x wall with USB hole for the base (PA12 Nylon SLS)
- Lid for base (PLA FDM)
- Crown structure for surrounding cone (PA12 Nylon SLS)
- Cap for crown structure (PLA FDM)
Glue the walls together (I used "Super Glue") with the notches at the bottom facing inward. Snap fit the walls into the base.
From the image below, you can see where the usb hole faces relative to the other items extending from the base. Then rest the Pi and speaker in the base in the designated areas.
Here it is assembled!
I'm using the Words API to give Maria the ability to define words when asked for the "meaning of," the "definition of" or to "define" something. I went with Words API since it had a nice (in my opinion) freemium model, and the definitions returned seem fairly complete and more naturalistic to speech.
short_definition.mp4
Maria is still a WIP and buggy, but I think these updates are quite fun!