Your hands are filthy from working on your latest project and you need to run the water to wash them. But you don’t want to get the taps filthy too. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just tell them to turn on hot, or cold? Or if the water’s too cold, you could tell them to make it warmer. [Vije Miller] did just that, he added servo motors to his kitchen tap and enlisted an AI to interpret his voice commands.
Look closely at the photo and you can guess that he started with a single-lever type of tap, the kind which can be worked with an elbow, so this project was probably just for fun and judging by his video below, he does have a sense of humor. But the idea is practical for dual taps with rotating knobs. He did realize, however, that in future versions he should move the servo motor openings from the top plate to the bottom instead, to avoid any water getting in. A NodeMCU ESP8266 ESP-12E board serves for communicating with the speech recognition side but other than the name, JacobAI, he’s keeping the speech part to himself. We secretly suspect that he has a friend named Jacob.
However, we can think of a number of options for it such as DeepSpeech and Wit.ai which we covered when talking about natural language phone bots, and the ubiquitous Alexa as used here with another NodeMCU for turning on Christmas tree lights.
Could I adapt this to my toilet? FIRE 1, FIRE 2!
That works. All I did was buy a hands-free. Worked fine till it started eating batteries.
Jacob was named after a Biblical reference and is my voice automation system I have used in previous projects for years (going back to XP). I recommend http://voiceattack.com for others bcz it’s extremely flexible and interprets statements very well as compared to some other open source applications .. and as opposed to being spied on by Amaooglpple.
Wouldn’t it have been better if the enclosure was mounted the other way around? It would prevent water from getting in there. It can still be done, but the cable would be in the front.
Yes, it would have been better mounted the other way around. I mentioned in the article that he realized that.
“He did realize, however, that in future versions he should move the servo motor openings from the top plate to the bottom instead, to avoid any water getting in.”
He has a note about it on his thingiverse page https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3074690.
If voice recognition/AI engine is propietary or it can’t be self-hosted, it isn’t worthy.
Absolutely agree. I’m never trusting voice command software made by an adtech behemoth and running on their servers. Obviously untrustworthy.
That reminds me I need to make a hardware switch for my phone mic.
Jacob is local .. I just nickname it ‘proprietary’ bcz it has over the years been isolated from other designs via my own contributions to the software. I 147% agree about non-local voice .. which is why I note ‘no Amaoogpple’
What bothers me about IR activated faucets is most of the sensors are aimed above the the sink basin. When I lower my hands into the basin to minimize splashing the countertop, the faucet shuts off!
Those are utterly annoying. They isolate such a narrow field which offers no consistency for every type of personality of hand-interaction. Despite having made the above .. there are most things we never need automated. I like the idea of a foot lever.
It is already automated. Swap the wifi for a 555 and a foot controlled potentiometer and you should be golden. :D