Research undaunted
On and off, I’ve spent about 20 hours over the last few days researching how to connect the new arduino to a google spreadsheet… I think that officially means I’m back in the development game.
I haven’t had a lot of success in trying to figure this out yet. I’ve been doing a lot of forum diving, which surprisingly isn’t turning up a lot of information. The one instance that comes to mind, when thinking back to what I read when someone posted that they needed help getting their data to a spreadsheet and one of the “helpful internet people” asked a bunch of questions to understand the scope of the project - including why the live data needs to be on a spreadsheet. The guy answered all questions except for the why… but in the course of the thread, the dude mentioned he is in school; presumably the assignment requires a spreadsheet… and the “helper” was just going off on him about CSV files and why didn’t he answer the Q instead of saying anything productive. Sounds to me like the helper’s ego wasn’t going to let him admit he didn’t know how to upload directly to a spreadsheet. Unfortunately that analogy is an awful lot like how my search is going at the moment… lots of info says “Yes its possible to connect to a spreadsheet” but I have yet to find sample code that wasn’t written for the NodeMCU I as using in the first incarnation of the Colonel.
Late Saturday afternoon I found something that might be the game changer I was looking for. I found some technical info about how the wifi Arduino can connect to the Arduino cloud, which can then talk to the google cloud and upload my data that way. I haven’t had a chance to circle back to see how easy/difficult that might be, but its a fantastic new starting point!
Also related to the Google cloud, I’ve also done a little more reading on voice synthesizers for the Colonel (like I said, giving the Colonel a voice is on the dream build list) and apparently there is a google voice that can be accessed by the arduino… google generates the voice according to the data the Arduino sends it, which the arduino can then play back on an attached speaker. No fancy hardware required.
One of the other voice options I came across in my reading is grabbing what is essentially a soundcard for the arduino and having it use pre-recorded sounds/responses instead of generating “fresh words” for every output. This suggestion made a lot of sense to me, as it can be used for offline responses - internet is not required as well, I can load it with fun “system sounds” like having an air-raid siren go off when something goes wrong or a sonar ping when I have the sensors run a diagnostic. I ordered one… as well as a 512 GB memory card. Hot Damn! The Colonel’s got half a TB to fill.
Funny enough, one of the other things that came up in my results while searching for a voice synth was voice recognition systems, for issuing verbal commands to an Arduino. I bought one of these as well. Apparently it has memory for 70 commands, and can run up to 7 of them at a time.
I also ordered up some new LCD screens… a large 20 x 4 as well as 3x .91” which I’m thinking I could try to use for eyes/a mouth.
The best part is that ALL of those bits connect via i2c, which means a total of 4 lines (2 power + 2 comm) are all that will be required to control the full shebang!
Wow… as an aside I just realized how much I’ve accelerated through parts of this project… I thought the voice/sound thing was going to be a lot more of an ordeal… and I never even dreamed that I’d be able to incorporate voice control… it wasn’t even on the dream list.
