Setting up the respeaker
The Seeed Respeaker 4-Mic Array Pi HAT is, as they say in the business, a nifty bit of kit. As well as four microphones, it has twelve LEDS which can be used to indicate audio direction of arrival, or just to flash randomly and concerningly. It has GPIO and I2C connections so that other devices can be daisychained to it, or it can stack directly onto Seeed’s Grovepi hub, allowing even more sensors to be connected. It uses the AC108 codec which at present isn’t supported by the Raspbian kernel, so we’ll need to install a custom one. Connect to the Pi, either by SSH or keyboard, and quit the Mycroft CLI. Run the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/respeaker/seeed-voicecard.git cd seeed-voicecard sudo ./install.sh
The install script will chug along for a while, and eventually you’ll be able to reboot and activate the new kernel with sudo reboot . Reconnect if you were Sshing, then run sudo raspi-config to set up the audio. Select ‘7. Advanced Options’, then ‘A4. Audio’, then ‘1. Force 3.5mm jack’. Then reboot and enjoy.
If you run into difficulties you may need to install Pulseaudio and restart Mycroft’s daemons, with:
$ sudo apt install pulseaudio $ ./start-mycroft.sh all restart If it still doesn’t work (and remember, if in doubt a reboot never hurts), the Pulseaudio input device may need to be changed. List the devices with
pactl list sources and then change the default to match the line beginning Name in the output, with:
pactl set-default-source “alsa_ input.platform-soc_sound. multichannel-input”