A new audiovisual project that helps you print sound waves is now available for your Raspberry Pi 3. Called the Waves project, the new development detects the sound waves from a microphone to draw them on paper.
The latest Raspberry Pi project is created by students of Northwestern University, Illinois. Powered by the Raspberry Pi 3, the new technology can record the spoken responses to questions and print them as sound waveforms using a built-in thermal receipt printer. The printer is equipped with a standard USB microphone and four tactile buttons.
Developers need to press the button belonging to a certain question that requires to be answered. Raspberry Pi 3 board is used to record audio via the provided microphone and save the audio file on the storage device. The Raspberry Pi SBC then passes the data to the available thermal printer to print the audio file as waveforms. Additionally, the device is capable of printing the question along with its answer in the waveform.
The Waves device uses the tactile buttons and corresponds four colour-coded cards that represent four questions, each of which is placed with a matching button on the breadboard.
Python tools to automate printing process
The project uses Python script viz.py to prompt the latest Raspberry Pi model to record audio from the microphone. Also, Python-based Matplotlib Magic is used to turn the audio file as a waveform image.
Eunice Lee, Matthew Zhang and Bomani McClendon of the Northwestern University has open sourced the Waves project. It has been available along with the source code and documentation on GitHub.
