work in progress

I’m working on the integration of kiku (voice recognition to control your OS) to Vinux (Linux for the visually impaired). For now the feedback about kiku is great, but one thing people wants is a solution for dictation (that is, speech to text). kiku could be use for that task, but sadly there is no good (accurate) acoustic model available under GPL (Voxforge is a good start, but not there yet – please contribute).

So i came up with this online speech recognition for dictation solution to overcome this limitation. Speak in different languages, spell check, translate and text to speech all in one place. You’ll need Google Chrome and a microphone.

on march 11 my apartment in tokyo was shook by an earthquake of magnitude 9.0:

since i don’t have a mobile phone (i must be the only one in japan without a keitai) i wasn’t aware of the incoming earthquake and my software was useless (being alert 10 minutes after the earthquake):

by detecting the primary waves we know in how many seconds (depending on the epicenter location) an earthquake will occur. i don’t know if it’s possible to build a p waves monitoring device (anyone?), but for now i’m using a free software (windows & japanese only) that send me an alert (no hardware required).

connecting the software to a microcontroller was not that hard, but since i don’t want to boot in windows just for monitoring the p waves i had to hack little. grosso modo: virtual box (windows in linux) -> autoit (checking for a p waves popup) -> create file <- linux bash checking for new file -> send serial command to arduino -> physical feedback.

please make a donation to the japanese red cross society

the idea is simple:

• take an old electric toothbrush;
• add a led and a vibrator;
• shape something around it;

i am using polycaprolactone (FDA approuved). the schematic is pretty simple, but i had to play with the capacitor and inductor to get more power into the vibrator. it’s overkill to use an attiny for cycling the colors of the led (i didn’t know that you can buy RGB led with built-in pwm). even so, i am sharing the small code, maybe it can be useful to someone. since i am using an electric toothbrush there’s no physical connection to recharge it, thus completely waterproof. i will need to remelt the polycaprolactone to change the battery someday.

 #define F_CPU 9600000UL
 #include <avr/io.h>
 #include <util/delay.h>
 #define LED PB0
 #define LED2 PB1
 int i;
 
 int main (void)
 {
	 DDRB = 0xff;
	 TCCR0A |= ((1 << COM0A1) | (1 << COM0A0) | (1 << COM0B1) | (1 << COM0B0) | (1 << WGM01) | (1 << WGM00)); // WGM01 - WGM00 (set fast PWM)
	 OCR0A = 0; // initialize Output Compare Register A to 0
	 OCR0B = 0;
	 TCCR0B |= (1 << CS01); // Start timer at Fcpu / 256
 
	 for (;;)
	 {
		 for (i = 0 ; i < 255 ; i++ ) // For loop (Up counter 0 - 255)
		 {
			  OCR0A = i; // Update Output Compare Register (PWM 0 - 255)
			 _delay_ms(8);
		 }
		 for (i = 255 ; i > 1 ; i-- ) // For loop (down counter 255 - 0 )
		 {
			 OCR0B = i; // Update Output Compare Register (PWM 0 - 255)
			 _delay_ms(8);
		 }
		 for (i = 255 ; i > 1 ; i-- ) // For loop (down counter 255 - 0 )
		 {
			  OCR0A = i; // Update Output Compare Register (PWM 0 - 255)
			 _delay_ms(8);
		 }
		 for (i = 0 ; i < 255 ; i++ ) // For loop (Up counter 0 - 255)
		 {
			  OCR0B = i; // Update Output Compare Register (PWM 0 - 255)
			 _delay_ms(8);
		 }
	 }
 }

if you are curious to see the electronic town (Akihabara) in Tokyo:

I wrote this software (based on JMDict) to learn new words in japanese. It’s written in C++ (wxWidgets) and use sqlite3. A compiled version for Windows is available for download (with installer / uninstaller). I am sharing the source, but i won’t recommend to learn from it (a cobe::blocks project).

Here’s a screenshot in Windows:

Here’s a screenshot in Ubuntu / Gtk:

Download the installer (for Windows, beta)
Download the source (code::blocks)