Christopher Luke Etinas

October 7, 2015
Period 2
Raspberry Pi Application Brief
An application for the Raspberry Pi, that seems interesting to me, would be to use it to
make a touchscreen device. Since, this is very complex and intricate however, my second choice
would be to use the Raspberry Pi to control home devices such as lights. This interests me
because I would want to use this to control the color of the lights in my own house, but also to
turn it off without touching it. This will be controlled by voice recognition, or as a backup, with a
simple remote that will only have on and off. The voice recognition will also control the on and
off switch, but it will control the different circuits for the LED lights. To know what to do, I will
have to research about the programming of the speech recognition and light control, wiring to the
Pi from the lights, and wiring from the microphone to the Pi.
The programming that is required to make this application possible will be speech
recognition, and programming that translates certain words like On and Off to command
certain lights to change. The first step for the Pi, is to download the program called PyAudio.
PyAudio is a program that records sound into the Pi. PyAudio also uses an external USB
microphone to gather the sound. The next part of code records the sound and can be altered with
modification to the code. The coding for speech recognition uses Googles speech-to-text, which
has some limitations on speech. The first limitation is that the commands can only be 15 seconds
long, which does not interrupt our process because our commands will be about 1-3 seconds
long. The second limitation is that once the speech-to-text is converted into code, the code is now

in a FLAC format. This does not change much again, but will cause an impact if it is converted
to MP3 files or another audio file.
Coding cannot be converted into electrical signals, but it can cut off or allow certain
pathways to be opened. In this case, the pathways are the metal pins that stick out of the Pi and
connect to the GPIO cable. When electricity flows, it flows through a circuit, which has the LED
lights and turns on whichever was in the circuit. A circuit is a closed pathway, that starts and
finishes in the same place. Three circuits are required to build this, because if two or more LED
lights are in the same circuit they will not light up. Since each LED needs to be separate they
need their own track, or circuit.
To input sound into the Pi, we need a microphone. The only microphone that works with
the PyAudio, are USB microphones. We will be using a microphone called the Snowball by
Blue. This type of microphone is a condenser microphone, which can transfer sound vibrations
into electrical currents called voltage signals. When sound exists near the microphone, a metal
plate inside vibrates according to the sound waves and another plate is stationary. When these
two plates come close to each other, the circuit is completed and electricity can flow through.
When electricity flows, an electric field is created and depending on the amount of electricity
that is flowing, the electrical field will change. When the electrical field changes the audio signal
as well.
A breadboard is a board that is used to test and experiment with electrical circuits.
Wireless bulbs are harder to program, connect, and much more expensive to buy, which is why
we are doing a wired bulb. Since LED bulbs are easier to connect to circuits than regular bulbs,
we will be using the LED bulbs and inserting them into the circuit on the breadboard. When the

CPU routes the electrical current to a certain circuit on the breadboard, the circuit will light up
with the LED that is in that circuit. The breadboard can test anything that is less than 5V, but
requires a circuit, which is to connect the positive and negative sides to each other and allow
electricity to flow. Since our application requires multiple LED lights, we need multiple circuits
for each LED light.
There are different kind of light bulbs, and the one we will using is called an LED light.
LED stand for light emitting diode and contains a p-n junction. A p-n junction is called that
because one part is positive and one is negative. To make one negative and one positive, other
metallic substances are added to the silicon, which is the base of the diode. To make one part
negative, a small amount of arsenic or phosphorus is added to the silicon. This is because both
elements have one valence electron, which means it takes a little amount of energy to have light
emitted. In the positive part, either gallium or boron is used. When one of these two elements are
added to silicone, it makes a hole like structure where the electrons do not have anything to bond
to, which acts as a positive charged substance. When electrons pass to the positive side, the
electrons keep moving because the holes create the positive charge. The electrons flow through
the holes and into the negative side of the diode, and into the circuit.
One similar product, was one made to use voice recognition for the Raspberry Pi. He did
this by using a microphone and a Raspberry Pi. He first downloaded PyAudio, which is the
program that converts sound into coding. He setup the microphone by plugging it into the Pi and
testing the sound. He then activated certain words to do a specific task. The first task he made,
was that when the word Pi was said, the Pi would be listening to the next command that is
said. Since, the word Pi however sounded like the word Hi, he changed the word to Hi,

because the Pi recognized the word Hi more than the other. Although there was that one
problem, his project was a success for the aspect of making the Pi recognize voice commands.

Works Cited
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"How Semiconductors Work." HowStuffWorks. 24 Apr. 2001. Web. 20 Oct. 2015.
"Morse Code on an LED." - Physical Computing with Raspberry Pi. Web. 20 Oct. 2015.
"Tweaking4All.com - Hardware - What Is a Breadboard and How to Use It ..."
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