Tag Archives: Fusion HAT+

AI On the Edge, Tutorial

AI on the Edge LESSON 14: Control LED Color With Voice Commands on Raspberry Pi 5

In Lesson 14 of AI on the Edge, we’re doing something really fun and powerful — we’re building a voice-controlled RGB LED that listens to you, changes colors on command, and even talks back with some personality! This is true edge AI running 100% locally on your Raspberry Pi with the Fusion HAT. No cloud, no internet, just fast, private, and responsive voice interaction right on your desk.

You simply speak a color — red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, off, or even quit — and the RGB LED instantly springs to life with beautiful color. But that’s not all. Every time you give a command, the system replies with a fun, playful spoken response using the Piper text-to-speech engine. It turns your Raspberry Pi into a charming little LED companion that feels alive and interactive.In this lesson, you’ll learn how to combine local Speech-to-Text with the STT library and natural-sounding Text-to-Speech with Piper. You’ll master PWM control of a full-color RGB LED through the Fusion HAT, and you’ll see how to use Python threading plus a queue to keep the voice listening running smoothly in the background without ever locking up your main program. The code is clean, well-structured, and includes proper startup greetings, graceful shutdown, and excellent resource cleanup — exactly the kind of solid practices we love in this series.What makes this project extra special is how it brings everything together. You get real-time voice recognition, instant hardware response, and spoken feedback — all happening locally on the edge. It’s fast, it’s private, and it’s incredibly satisfying to watch that LED light up exactly as you command while your Pi chats back at you.

Go ahead and watch the full Lesson 14 video, grab the complete code from the description, and build this project step by step with me. Once you have it running, I want you to play with it! Add new colors, create your own funny responses, or start thinking about how you could combine this voice control with sensors or other hardware in future projects.

This is the kind of hands-on, creative AI application that makes learning so exciting. You’re not just watching — you’re building real, useful skills that put you in the driver’s seat with artificial intelligence.

Fire up that Raspberry Pi, get your Fusion HAT ready, and let’s make some colors shine while the Pi talks back. I can’t wait to see what you create with this one!

Happy building, everyone — I’ll see you in the next lesson!

This is the schematic we are using for the project:

Fusion Hat Circuit Diagram
This is the circuit we will use moving forward in the class

This is the code we developed in the video:

 

AI On the Edge, Tutorial

AI on the Edge LESSON 13: Control LED Brightness with Voice Commands on Raspberry Pi 5

Hey everyone, welcome back to the AI on the Edge series!

In today’s lesson, we’re taking another big step forward in building truly interactive AI projects that run right on our Raspberry Pi 5. We’re going to give our hardware a voice — literally. You’ll learn how to control the brightness of an LED using simple voice commands like “low”, “medium”, “high”, “on”, and “off”.

This lesson builds directly on the speech-to-text skills we learned earlier. Using the Fusion Hat’s microphone and the excellent STT library, we create a system where you can speak naturally to your Pi and it responds instantly by changing the LED brightness. We also bring in Python threading so the voice listening doesn’t block the main program — which is a critical skill as our projects get more complex.

One of the things I really like about this project is how it shows the power of combining AI with real hardware. You’re not just making the LED turn on and off anymore — you’re giving it smooth, adjustable brightness control using nothing but your voice. It’s a perfect example of the kind of interactive, intelligent edge computing we’re working toward in this class.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a solid understanding of how to use voice commands to control hardware, how to manage multiple things happening at the same time with threading, and how to create a much more natural and user-friendly interface for your projects.

This is the kind of thing that makes your Raspberry Pi projects feel alive and responsive. Whether you eventually want to control motors, lights, robots, or entire systems with your voice, the techniques you learn in this lesson will serve as a strong foundation.

So grab your SunFounder Fusion AI Hat, hook up that red LED, and let’s get your Raspberry Pi listening and responding to your voice commands like a proper smart device!

As always, I encourage you to type the code along with me in the video, then play around with it. Try adding more commands, change the LED color, or combine it with other sensors. That’s where the real learning and creativity happens.

I’m really excited to see what you build with this one!

This is the schematic we are using, from LESSON #5.

Fusion Hat Circuit Diagram
This is the circuit we will use moving forward in the class

In the video, this is the code we developed:

 

AI On the Edge, Tutorial

AI on the Edge LESSON 11: Control LED on Raspberry Pi With Voice Commands

In today’s lesson, we’re taking our first exciting step into giving our Raspberry Pi the ability to understand and respond to our voice. That’s right — we’re going to control a physical LED using nothing but spoken commands! This is a huge milestone in the class because it marks the beginning of building truly interactive AI projects that can listen to us and take action in the real world.

Using the SunFounder Fusion AI Hat’s built-in microphone and the excellent STT (Speech-to-Text) library, we create a simple but powerful voice assistant that can turn an LED on and off with commands like “on”, “off”, and “quit”. I walk you through every single line of the code so you can clearly see how we capture voice input, process the command, and control real hardware.

This lesson is intentionally straightforward because I want you to build a strong foundation. Once you understand how to take a voice command and turn it into physical action, we can start adding more complexity — like controlling multiple devices, adjusting brightness, or even combining voice control with computer vision in future lessons.

One of the things I love most about this project is how it makes the Raspberry Pi feel “alive.” Instead of clicking buttons or typing commands, you can now talk directly to your project. This is the kind of interaction that makes edge AI projects so much fun and so powerful.

By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a working voice-controlled LED and the confidence to start expanding your voice control skills. This is exactly the kind of capability we need as we move forward in the AI on the Edge journey — giving our intelligent systems natural, human-friendly ways to interact with us.

So grab your Fusion AI Hat, hook up that LED, and let’s turn your Raspberry Pi into a voice-controlled device! As always, I strongly encourage you to code along with me in the video and then play around with the program. Try adding more commands, control multiple LEDs, or even have it say something back to you.

This is where things start getting really fun. Let’s get that LED responding to your voice!

This is the schematic of the circuit we are using for our AI class. We go into great detail on this schematic in LESSON #5 if you want to learn more about it.

Fusion Hat Circuit Diagram
This is the circuit we will use moving forward in the class

Now this is the code we developed in this lesson:

 

AI On the Edge

AI on the Edge LESSON 9: Make Your Raspberry Pi Talk with TTS

In today’s lesson, we’re going to make a huge leap forward in giving our Raspberry Pi some real personality. We’re going to teach it how to talk using Text-to-Speech (TTS). Instead of just blinking LEDs or printing text to the screen, our Pi will now speak out loud with a clear, natural-sounding voice.

This is a really fun and important lesson because one of the main goals of this class is to build intelligent systems that can interact with us in more human ways. Being able to make your Raspberry Pi speak opens up all kinds of exciting possibilities — whether you want your robot to tell you what it sees, have your AI assistant read sensor data out loud, or just add some personality and humor to your projects.

In this video, I show you how to use the TTS capabilities on the SunFounder Fusion AI Hat. You’ll learn how to install and set up the TTS engine, speak simple sentences, change voices, and control when the Pi talks. We’ll also look at how to make the speech sound more natural and how to integrate it smoothly into your programs without freezing everything else.

By the end of this lesson, your Raspberry Pi will be able to speak clearly and confidently — which is going to make the rest of our AI on the Edge journey a lot more exciting. Voice output combined with voice input (which we’ll work on soon) is what turns a simple circuit into a real interactive AI companion.

So go ahead and grab your Fusion AI Hat, plug in a speaker, and let’s give your Raspberry Pi a voice! As always, I encourage you to code along with me in the video and then experiment. Try making it say funny things, read temperatures, announce when it detects a face — whatever sparks your creativity.

This is where your projects start to feel truly alive.

I’m really excited for you on this one — let’s make your Raspberry Pi talk!

This is the schematic we are using on these projects;

Fusion Hat Circuit Diagram
This is the circuit we will use moving forward in the class

This Schematic is explained in detail in LESSON #5.

Then this is the code we developed in today’s lesson.

 

AI On the Edge, Tutorial

AI on the Edge LESSON 8: Text to Speech (TTS) on the Raspberry Pi

In this video lesson I will show you how to get the Raspberry Pi to speak to you in plain English. This is our first dabbling with AI. In earlier lessons we have discussed that one of our first objectives will be to begin to audibly interact with our project through speech. The first step will be to get the Pi to talk to us. Then in future lessons we will show how to get the Pi to listen to us.

In this lesson we demonstrated simple Text to Speech (TTS) with this code.

Remember this program requires use of the AI Educational OS we flashed in LESSON #2.

As we say in the video, the first time you run the program you will get a permission error. This is because the model folders are inside a system folder and must be created as a ‘superuser’ using ‘sudo’. As shown in the video, you need to open a terminal window, and type in these commands at the command prompt (Put them in one at a time):

You only need to do that one time. Next time you run the program, all will work properly.

Then, in order to hear all the different voice models Piper offers, you can run this program, and each voice will introduce itself to you.

 

Remember in these early lessons we are using this circuit to demo our programs. Please leave this circuit put together.

Fusion Hat Circuit Diagram
This is the circuit we will use moving forward in the class