![]() (disregard error messages on the terminal if you can hear sound): espeak “hello” Run the following in terminal: sudo apt-get install espeakĪfter it is successfully installed, run the following command. If you are able to hear the sounds, move to the next step! If not, this tutorial may help you setup the audio. Plug a headphone or speakers in the audio jack and run the following command: aplay /usr/share/sounds/alsa/* ![]() Here is a definitive guide to TTS on RPi.įirst test if the audio is working on the Raspberry Pi. It works fine for our purposes: the voice is a little robotic, but it does the job. Our camera setup helped a lot with the changing the position of the camera to get a good image.įor the TTS, we are using eSpeak. You may need to readjust the focus of the camera and angle at this point. Now secure the camera at the desired height and place the book under it. If the camera is initialized properly you’ll see a new file image.jpg in your present folder. It should be helpful in setting up both the hardware and software.Īfter the camera is set up, test it to see if it works: raspistill -o image.jpg Here is a great guide to setting up the Raspi Camera. Now fix the camera into it’s adapter next to the Ethernet Jack. In rig we built, we have the camera about 10 inches above the book(choose a height which is comfortable for you and take a few test images to check if the images are clear and the whole page is captured). Here are some helpful links to do focus the camera:Īfter setting up the camera, take a test image to see that it is properly focused. The Raspberry Pi camera comes with its focus fixed at infinity, and since it is a fixed focus camera you have to manually change it. The Raspberry Pi camera packs a lot of punch, there are a lot of options, it’s easy to set up, and the image quality is acceptable for our project.Īfter connecting the camera, there is one more thing to do: change the focus of the Raspberry Pi camera. The first thing to get our Bookreader up and running is to get the Raspberry Pi camera working. Parts Required:īuilding the Bookreader Setting up the camera: ![]() Then the Raspberry Pi takes a picture of the page, Tesseract OCR converts it to text and espeak speaks it aloud through speakers connected to the Raspberry Pi. Once the page is up, another motor rotates an arm 360 degrees and it turns the page over. A wheel, which is a bit heavy, rotates for a fixed time and pushes the page up (this is much easier said than done), our friends friction and gravity help a lot here (it required a lot of fine tuning the variables like motor speed, wheel placement, time etc to get it to work properly). The page turning mechanism works as follows. We accomplished the page turning by using two EV3 motors, and a LEGO wheel. Since we already had the software with the character recognition and text to speech part worked out, the only thing that we needed to develop was a good page turning mechanism and synchronize everything properly. Something we had a plenty of lying around: LEGO Blocks. We even thought of using the LEGO Pneumatics but settled on something else. We also found a video of the Google Book Scanner on Hackaday which is probably the best thing available, but it was an overkill. We found a good post on DIY Book scanner with a cool video of a page turning mechanism but it was too much for us to build. But for the page turning mechanism, there was nothing that you could build easily. ![]() You can find all the parts of the project already implemented somewhere and after a bit of fiddling and hacking, you can can get a decent project together. For almost every project out there, there is always a good place to start with. There was not a good way available for turning the pages, something which could turn the pages of a real book efficiently without missing a lot of pages.įor the first time Google failed to deliver. ![]() But there was a slight problem with that. Raspberry Pi Book Reader with LEGO Mindstorms and the Raspberry Pi.Īfter completing the first book reader, we really wanted to get the real book reading, and push out our example. Here we present to you the BrickPi Bookreader 2 which can read aloud a real book (the voice becomes a bit irritating after a while) and also turn the pages of the book (we are really proud of this). But what everyone really wanted was a bookreader that could read a real paper book. There was a huge response to the project. A few months ago, we made a Bookreader powered by the BrickPi which had the ability to read pages from your Kindle. ![]()
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