Programming our robot

As discussed earlier in this chapter, Mycroft is a version of a digital assistant similar to Siri from Apple or Alexa from Amazon in that it can listen to voice commands in a mostly normal fashion and interface those commands to a computer. We are using it because it has an interface that runs on a Jetson Nano 3. In this section, we will be setting up our hardware and our software (i.e., Mycroft).

Setting up the hardware

We will be installing Mycroft on Nvidia Jetson Nano (or whatever microprocessor you’re using). One of the few things that the Jetson Nano did not come with is audio capability. It has no speakers or microphones. I found that a quick and effective way to add that capability was to use an existing hardware kit that provided both a very high-quality speaker and an excellent set of stereo microphones in a robot-friendly form factor. Note that this works with pretty much any Linux single-board computer (SBC).

The kit is a miniature...