Brendan Peachey

Sensei Brent
10/7/2015
Per. 2
Raspberry Pi Research
In Computer Engineering my group Luke, Nalu, and I decided we wanted to create a
voice activated light so we researched and decided on a final project. We were originally going to
use wireless light bulbs but that would cost too much so we settled on just using lights on a
breadboard. We all split up the work load and recorded the research into out own words because
we are not exactly a team.
We are using LED lights on the breadboard so I was told to figure out how LEDs work
and what they are. LED stands for Light Emitting Diode. An LED is a smaller sized light bulb
that has a much higher life than a normal light bulb. The diodes are semiconductors that control
where the electricity goes. The diode does this through a thing called the p-n junction which is
created from a p-type semiconductor and an n-type semiconductor. The p-type semiconductor is
a positive charge and the n-type semiconductor is a neutral charge. The junction is the base of all
semiconductor electronic devices. Usually LEDs are only one color but lately manufacturers
have made multicolor LEDs.
Programming is an open source for anything a person would want to do. Some people
decide they would want to do speech recognition which you would need to follow certain
instructions with software such as PyAudio which changes voice commands into coding. You
will need a microphone so you can record the commands you would like to do like On, Off, or
certain colors. The PyAudio uses Google speech to text which can cause some problems even
though it does work. Some problems that you may run into is that when you record the voice
commands you can only record up to fifteen seconds which would not be a problem for our
project because we have relatively short commands.
Circuits are the key to coding commands. A circuit is a closed path for electricity to
power certain things. The coding cannot just make your projects turn on and off that is where the
circuit comes in. The circuit is like a gate that you can open and close with a switch. When you
close the gate it means that no electricity can get through to power anything. If you wanted to
light up LEDs but not at the same time you would need a few different circuits to power the
lights at different times.
We needed an audio device to create voice commands of course so I brought in my
Snowball Microphone from the company Blue. The microphone is a certain type called a
condenser microphone. The condenser microphones have a special type of cord that has two
metal plates with one that is stationary and one is let loose to vibrate. A battery or power source
puts an electrical current into the the two plates. When the one vibrating plate hits the stationary

plate it interrupts the current which creates the audio signal. Then the signals will be sent to the
Raspberry pi and later the breadboard.
The breadboard is a device where you can test out different circuits so you can make
them perfect for when you want to melt them onto the permanent board. We decided that instead
of buying a wireless LED light we would just try to control different circuits on the breadboard.
The process begins with the microphone which sends out the different commands to the
Raspberry Pis CPU which then it processes it and sends it to the breadboard to the specified
circuit which then gives the circuit power to light up the certain LEDs. The breadboard can
unfortunately only stand 5V but its still good for testing out for the final product.
In conclusion my group has changed a lot with our final project. The Raspberry Pi can be
a hard system to understand but with our research and each other's help we are getting a hang of
it. I think that we will be able to create our voice recognition relatively easy when the time
comes.