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"Open air" and "whole home" microphones / How to interface with TcpMic?
« on: September 19, 2015, 05:58:10 PM »
Hi,
I'm experimenting with VoxCommando to drive my home automation system. Getting commands right is the 'easy' part (for some values of 'easy'), my main problem is with getting coverage throughout the house. I have a server in the basement but no way to directly hook up mics to that machine, so in my 'production' build (I'm just testing right now) I'd need 'satellite' mics in each room and a way to transmit audio to VoxCommado. What I'm thinking right now is to have my USB mic (MXL AC404 USB) hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, have the Raspberry do the preprocessing (equalizing, filtering) and then pipe that (the raw audio) to my main server with VoxCommando. I want to write my own (C++) daemon on the Raspberry that will read from the sound card, maybe do the preprocessing through alsa filters or when worse comes to worst write my own signal processing software, and send the raw sound data to the VoxCommando server.
Now I have the following questions:
- The TcpMic input format doesn't seem to be documented anywhere; in fact all documentation just points to a wiki page that doesn't exist any more. Do I just open a socket and send 16-bit PCM data there? Will that also work for an 'always on' situation, i.e. do I just send a never-ending stream of audio data?
- How do I handle multiple 'senders'? Do I need to start multiple VoxCommando instances (haven't tested if that's even possible) or can the TcpMic plugin listen on multiple ports (doesn't look so from the UI)? Would you be willing to modify it so that it can, or give me the source of the TcpMic plugin so that I can build my own custom version?
- Once I get multiple senders working (presuming that's possible), how does that work out in VoxCommando? My goal is of course location awareness - when I say 'lights on' in the office, I want it to turn on the office lights, and same in the living room. Let's assume that no mic can pick up sounds from 'other' rooms. Is there a way to pass the 'source id' to the voice command and have it decide on what actions to perform? My goal in the end is just to do a single GET request to my (home-build) home automation system.
Thanks.
cheers,
roel
I'm experimenting with VoxCommando to drive my home automation system. Getting commands right is the 'easy' part (for some values of 'easy'), my main problem is with getting coverage throughout the house. I have a server in the basement but no way to directly hook up mics to that machine, so in my 'production' build (I'm just testing right now) I'd need 'satellite' mics in each room and a way to transmit audio to VoxCommado. What I'm thinking right now is to have my USB mic (MXL AC404 USB) hooked up to a Raspberry Pi, have the Raspberry do the preprocessing (equalizing, filtering) and then pipe that (the raw audio) to my main server with VoxCommando. I want to write my own (C++) daemon on the Raspberry that will read from the sound card, maybe do the preprocessing through alsa filters or when worse comes to worst write my own signal processing software, and send the raw sound data to the VoxCommando server.
Now I have the following questions:
- The TcpMic input format doesn't seem to be documented anywhere; in fact all documentation just points to a wiki page that doesn't exist any more. Do I just open a socket and send 16-bit PCM data there? Will that also work for an 'always on' situation, i.e. do I just send a never-ending stream of audio data?
- How do I handle multiple 'senders'? Do I need to start multiple VoxCommando instances (haven't tested if that's even possible) or can the TcpMic plugin listen on multiple ports (doesn't look so from the UI)? Would you be willing to modify it so that it can, or give me the source of the TcpMic plugin so that I can build my own custom version?
- Once I get multiple senders working (presuming that's possible), how does that work out in VoxCommando? My goal is of course location awareness - when I say 'lights on' in the office, I want it to turn on the office lights, and same in the living room. Let's assume that no mic can pick up sounds from 'other' rooms. Is there a way to pass the 'source id' to the voice command and have it decide on what actions to perform? My goal in the end is just to do a single GET request to my (home-build) home automation system.
Thanks.
cheers,
roel