New Project: Convo

Again - not really a new project at all, it just takes me ages to get around to updating this thing.

Awkward silences suck. Whether you're meeting your girlfriend's parents for the first time or making a tasteless joke at a funeral - the threat of a momentary pause in the conversation is an ever-present threat for the not-quite-entirely-antisocial engineer. Unavoidable? Not any more! Introducing Convo, the conversation-starting robot!

The circuit will be relatively simple - one or two minature microphones with amplifiers, a simple microcontroller (I'm using a PIC at the moment, but may switch to the new Value line of MSP430s when my dev kit arrives) with an ADC module, a CompactFlash or MMC card, and a small speaker and amplifier.

The flash card will be loaded with a large number of conversation-sparking sound clips ("How's about them current affairs?!"). The microcontroller will listen out for awkward conversation pauses using the microphones and play a random sound clip when one is detected. It should all be fairly easy to implement, I hope - although it may turn out to be very hard/impossible to get the actual awkward silence detection algorithm working well in all circumstances.

So far I have built the microphone and input amplifier circuit and connected it to a PIC16F819 via a very simple short-term smoothing circuit made from a capacitor and diode. The PIC constantly samples the smoothed output and turns on an LED when it's above a certain level.

Video:


There's only one bug at present - Convo appears to be generating awkward silence. Whenever I explain the idea to someone, my explanation is invariably followed by an extremely awkward silence. I'm not sure why...