Real communicator

Overview

I'm a big Star Trek fan (aka Trekkie) and have had this toy communicator for a while.

It's life-sized, but doesn't actually do anything except play some sound effects when you press the buttons, powered by a small button cell. I took it with me to Comic Con once to go with my TNG science officer outfit.

I opened it up and saw that there might be enough space to build something cool, so this page is to document my efforts in doing this!

Primary goals

In the first instance, to capture my voice (and button presses) and send these to my Node-RED instance, which controls my smart home, other automations, and even GPT-3-powered flows. Once I've got that, the sky's the limit. I could then:

• Directly send voice notes over WhatsApp to individuals (or at the very least, text via speech recognition)
• Control my home IoT devices of course
• Do other assistant-like things ("tell me the weather / a joke") or even have a direct line to ChatGPT
• Feel like I'm a Starfleet commander while doing so

Secondary goals

• Learn how to build things with the ESP32, and more about electronics in general
• Learn more about creating content for TikTok (I want to try recording short-form videos of my progress as I go along)

Components

1. The ESP32 -- dirt cheap WiFi and Bluetooth that I wish was available 10 years ago; the fun I could have had!

2. This little serial mic from atomic14 which he made a bunch of and sold on eBay

3. An old spare Raspberry Pi Zero

I highly doubt that I can power all this off those small button cells, but let's see! Maybe I don't even need the RPi, I genuinely don't know yet as I've never used an ESP32 before. Let's see how it goes!