Review: Grove Speech Recognizer Kit for Arduino

Retrofitting speech recognition to existing objects is possible thanks to all sorts of kits that have started popping up the last few years. In this article we look at one of these: the Grove Speech Recognizer Kit for Arduino from Seeed.

To update the software of a vintage microcontroller system you can simply replace the whole system or try to modify it. Replacing often means throwing away parts that work perfectly fine, which some people find hard to accept. If the old hardware is based on the venerable 8051 microcontroller then here's a way to replace it by a modern AVR micro while keeping all the rest. Immediate access to the wonderful world of Arduino is thrown in for free.

Microchip Technology Inc. announces a new 2D Touch Surface library that enables designers to easily implement touch pads using the company’s 8-bit PIC® and AVR® microcontrollers (MCUs) and 32-bit SAM MCUs. Available free of charge with the purchase of any compatible MCU, the library provides a simplified, low-cost solution for embedded applications.

Hexiwear is a wearable development kit for the Internet of Things era. A small and sleek, low-power device packed with sensors to quantify yourself and the world around you. Wirelessly enabled, it can connect both to devices nearby or to cloud servers far away.

The winners of the Elektor ESP32 Design Contest 2018 are known! After many hours of wading through project descriptions, watching videos and reading source code, the top 10 of the best projects has been established. What a difficult task it was for the jury with so many high-quality projects contesting for the fantastic prizes. And the Grand Prize has been awarded to...

The STM32L4R9I-EVAL board from STMicroelectronics is intended as a demonstration and development platform for their Arm-Cortex-M4-based STM32L4R9AI microcontroller. Besides the size of the board and the many components that populate it, the user’s attention and curiosity are immediately drawn by the unusual 30 mm (1.2”) circular smartwatch display just below the centre. This is more or less the star of the board, while the MCU itself is so unobtrusive that it is easy overlooked.

If you want to win one of the great prizes of our ESP32 Design Contest, then now is your chance, or, more accurate, your LAST opportunity as there is only one week left to terminate your project and post in at Elektor Labs. The more you publish the better your chances of becoming an ESP32 hero. Source code, schematics, videos and photos, and of course a clear description is what makes a project stand out. Don’t forget to click the red Publish button at the top of your project page! The deadline is March 31 @ 23:59:99999 CET (i.e. midnight in Central Europe).

Flash programmable Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs) are great for creating complex high-speed logic circuits. Unfortunately the current CPLDs, although affordable, come in packages that are hardly suited for soldering without special equipment. The 4-layer breakout board we present here is designed for easy prototyping with the 100-pin TQFP EPM570 MAX II CPLD containing 440 macro cells.

Experimenting, coding and building electronics around the Raspberry Pi can be simple, affordable and fun thanks to the pi-top ecosystem. pi-topPULSE is a cool accessory in the form of a HAT compatible device. It includes a 7x7 RGB LED grid, a 2 W-speaker and a microphone. Ambient lights reflect the state of the LED array. With pi-topPULSE, you'll code your own games, create music and lightshows, and get answers to any questions with Amazon Alexa.

The Australian company 4D Systems manufactures a range of easy-to-integrate intelligent display modules with and without touch capabilities. Programming the modules is done with Workshop4 IDE, featuring four environments from text-based to visual programming. Together they allow the user to have a graphical user interface (GUI) up and running in minutes rather than days.