It's powered by Raspberry Pi 3 and a thermal receipt printer

Jun 14, 2017 18:24 GMT  ·  By

Raspberry Pi Foundation's Alex Bate is informing the Raspberry Pi community today about the launch of a new audiovisual project called Waves, which makes it possible to print out sound waves with your favorite SBC.

Created by Northwestern University in Illinois students Eunice Lee, Matthew Zhang, and Bomani McClendon, the Waves project is capable of recording people’s spoken responses to personal questions, printing them as sound waveforms on a receipt paper.

Designed for fun as a side project, Waves is, in fact, a device based on the powerful Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computer, which comes built-in with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, a thermal receipt printer, a standard USB microphone, and a total of four tactile buttons.

"The Waves device is comprised of four tactile buttons, a standard USB microphone, and a thermal receipt printer," reads the article. "This type of printer has become easily available for the maker movement from suppliers such as Adafruit and Pimoroni."

How the Waves device works

If you're curious to know how the Waves device works, scroll down and watch the promo videos to see it in action. However, let us tell you that the four tactile buttons on the device correspond to four colour-coded cards, each one representing a question.

When users press the button belonging to the question that needs to be answered, the pre-installed viz.py Python script will launch to make the Raspberry Pi computer record audio via the microphone and save it on its storage device. After that, the Raspberry Pi will instruct the thermal printer to print the recorded file as waveform.

Turning an audio file as a waveform image is possible thanks to Python matplotlib magic. The printouts produced by the Waves device will also print the question along with the sound wave image on the receipt. Unfortunately, Waves is not available for purchase, but you are free to create your own using the open source and freely distributed code provided by the students on GitHub.