Question Box: A Portable Hacked Google Assistant

I had the opportunity to talk to an Amazon IoT engineer about his views on how they can better support the makers, hackers and hobbyists in the IoT space. The IoT world is very young and brimming with opportunity for clever and creative ideas. Given Amazon’s wide install base of Alexa paired with their dominance in cloud services that power it, you would think that fostering these innovators would be an obvious move. I had challenged him on the idea that Google’s AIY group has come up with really great projects to encourage and educate developers on the power of an IoT development kit paired with Google’s cloud platform. Here is what he had to say about it:

Google AIY Voice and Vision kits are only interesting for 5 to 10 year old kids
Amazon IoT Engineer

To be fair, my 10 year old was able to put together a Google AIY voice kit mostly by himself. It was a good experience for him to fold out the box and wire together the pi, voice hat, speaker and button. I had to hand hold him thru the software setup bits but in the end he really did enjoy it. But to think that this kit is ONLY geared towards the young, shows how misguided (or deluded) that statement is. With all of Amazon’s current advantage with IoT device integration between their voice assistant and other devices like lights and locks, it is surprising how behind they are when it comes to IoT development kits. Here is a list of available development kits for IoT developers https://devices.amazonaws.com/search?page=1&sv=gg_iot. You will notice that none of these boards (with the exception of the XBee) are well known to the maker community. I am not saying these kits are bad, they are very good in their own right given the right job. I would categorize these development kits as specialized for a target corporate market. In millennial terms, they are so low key and not lit af (I’m sure that’s the right way to say it). Even Microsoft has a decent maker kit that they put together in partnership with Adafruit. Microsoft’s IoT core even has support for Raspberry Pi! https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot-core/downloads

Adafruit is leading the way in creating a community of developers and makers that build clever and fun projects. They do this by investing in tutorials of projects that span IoT devices, robots, sensors, boards and many more. They then conveniently also have a store where you can get the quality parts needed to create those projects. Not only do they resell items from other manufacturers but they also design new development kits. They open source everything from code they write for the projects to the designs of their boards and board extensions. Lady Ada’s (founder and all around awesome maker) feather boards and wings are the most awesome idea since sliced bread for starting a standard for development boards and extensions. This small but agile company has attracted a community of makers and enthusiasts alike (and some are a bit older than 10 years old 😂) that are going determine what the future of IoT would be.

Particle is another company that understands how to foster innovation in the maker community. They have a growing number of development boards that is arduino based and is very easy to develop on. I give them props for building a development, deployment, tracking platform that will not drive you crazy. Their OTA code deployment to your particle photon development board was genius when I first used it years ago. They have now evolved the platform to where you have the same process for deploying your arduino code to 1 device or 1000 of them. Tracking and logistics are all part of their platform so you can monitor, flash and deploy your devices from anywhere in the world.

Adafruit and Particle are empowering the IoT innovators to come up with the next big idea
Mad Computer Scientist

After that conversation with said Amazon IoT engineer, I was inspired to build (another!) Google AIY voice kit. This time I decided to use a Raspberry Pi Zero to make the device smaller. I then found a cool little plastic box that opens sideways in my “will use this someday bin”. I wanted this version of the voice kit to be portable so I added a 1500mah lipo battery and a powerboost 1000c in the space between the pi and the voice hat.

Wiring the speaker, button and light was a bit more of a challenge since I had to replace the original LED button from the kit and use a smaller push button and a blue LED. I had a LED light diffuser that I scavenged from an old LED flashlight and put it on top of the LED. The original speaker also had to be replaced because it was just too big for this build. I had to remove the blue speaker mounts on the voice hat and replace it with a jst connector. I mounted them all outside the case along with the mic.

The “Hey Google” wake word function unfortunately does not work because the Raspberry Pi Zero has a lot less compute power compared to the recommended Raspberry Pi 3 for the Google voice kit. So you have to push the button to trigger it.

I decided to call it the question box since you can ask it any question wherever you are (as long as it can connect to the internet). Here’s what it looks like in action:

You can even make it do a bit of singing:

I showed the final build to my son and we played around with it, asking it questions like “Will Iron Man die in the Avengers: End Game movie?” (Sorry for the spoiler but if you haven’t watched it at this point it’s on you 🤣). My son is no stranger to odd electronics around the house. I have used him as a guinea pig for a lot of projects we work on. I wanted to see how someone his age would use a device like this when most adults will just say “I can do the same thing with my phone”. He then asked me if it would work if he took it to school because he wanted to show it to his classmates. I told him I can teach him how to set up a personal hotspot on his phone and connect the question box to it so he can use it as long as he had his phone close by. I asked him what he was planning to do with it. He said to ask it questions during homeroom because they’re not allowed to use their phones in the classroom. He also requested that there be a headphone jack so he can use it with earphones. I have a feeling he is going to be using it to show off to his classmates that he can answer any question they ask him 🤣.

I wanted to make sure he doesn’t get in trouble with it so I asked him again WHY he wanted to show it to his classmates. His answer reminded me of why what I do really matters to me: