MATRIX Voice Alexa Robot

A robot that can be controlled by voice via MATRIX Alexa.

IntermediateFull instructions provided1 hour1,564

Things used in this project

Hardware components

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

Amazon Alexa Amazon Echo

MATRIX Labs MATRIX Voice

UTSOURCE Electronic Parts

Story

In the previous post we showed you how to create a home automation system using MATRIX Alexa. One of our members - Binny Baburaj, took this project to the next level. He tinkered around with the code and made a obot that can be controlled via MATRIX Alexa.

The Matrix Voice Alexa Robot is a four-wheeled robot that can be controlled via MATRIX Alexa. In this post, we will sharing how to build one from scratch.

UTSource.net

UTSource is a professional electronic components supplier.

Components Needed

MATRIX Voice / Creator
Raspberry Pi 3 (Click to Purchase)
Speaker (Click to Purchase)
Micro SD Card (Click to Purchase)
Active Internet Connection
L293D Motor Driver

Prerequisites

Before starting the project it would be better if you know a little bit about the components and boards used in this project. Let us get familiarized.

Design your own PCBs for your Project!

I used Altium designer to draw the circuit and design the PCB. It is a powerful tool that can be used to design and create our own PCBs for our project as well as complex and multi-layer PCBs for industrial use.

If you are a DIY Electronic enthusiast, I bet this is gonna be really useful for you guys. I have been using it for the past 3-4 years and let me tell you guys, this is amazing! You can download the Free Trial of Altium PCB Designer from here.

PCB Design Tutorial using Altium

Check out the below video to start designing your own PCBs in Minutes!

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi is small credit card sized, light weight and compact computer available which is used by both professions, hobbyist and of course hackers alike. This mini computer can do (almost) any thing a normal linux machine can do. It is widely used in various industries, robotics, home automation projects.

MATRIX Voice

This little development board consist of a radial array of 8 MEMS microphones, 18 RGBW LED’s and 64 GPIO pins, which is linked to a Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA and 64 Mbit SDRAM. This provides the hobbyists and developers a wonderful opportunity to add custom voice and hardware-accelerated machine learning technology In no time.

An advanced version of this MATRIX Voice is also available employing a ESP32 Wi-Fi / BT chipset which will enable users to easily connect to the network or other devices via WiFi and Bluetooth in no time.

H-Bridge and L293D Motor Driver

An H-bridge is simply any circuit that allows a voltage to be applied across terminals of a resistance (in our case motor) in both direction without changing the hardware or rewiring. These circuits are most commonly used in robotics and other applications in order to rotate DC motors to to rotate them in either direction.

Click here to learn the working of an H-bridge motor driver.

L293D is one of the most commonly used motor driver ICs that allows DC motor to be driven on both direction. L293D is a 16 pin IC which can control two DC motors at the same time in any direction. It allows you to control two DC motor with a single L293D.