(^70) The Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book raspberrypi.org/magpi
’m grateful for finishing
this project,” says maker
Eunice Lee as she holds a
button while speaking into a large
silver microphone. A printout of
the sound waves produced by her
voice emerges from the device’s
thermal printer.
This is a demonstration of
Waves, a side project created by
Matt Zhang with Eunice Lee and
Bomani McClendon, who were
students of design and computer
science together at Northwestern
University in Illinois.
“During our first meeting, we
shared some inspiring hardware
projects we’d seen, and had a
brainstorm session where we drew
out lots of wild, funny, and weird
project ideas on Post-it notes,”
recalls Bomani. “Afterwards,
we voted on the ideas and filtered
them by feasibility, materials
cost, and (most importantly)
excitement. We chose Waves,
Projects SHOWCASE
Turn the sound of your voice into a printed waveform
The project
took 7–8 hours
to make
A controller
script handles
subprocesses
There’s no
maximum
recording
length
The same
amount of
paper is used
each time
Build details
and code are
on GitHub
magpi.cc/
2vANCvc
Quick
Facts
WAVES
“I
Above Two printouts of different responses,
both answering the question on the left
MATT, BOMANI & EUNICE
Matt Zheng, Bomani McClendon and
Eunice Lee were students of design
and computer science together at
Northwestern University in Illinois.
magpi.cc/2vANCvc
Holding the relevant
colour-coded button,
the user records
their answer
Users choose
to answer one
of four open-
ended questions
The thermal
printer plots a
waveform of the
recorded response
Below Matt Zheng
looks pleased with the
thermal printout of his
answer – we wonder
what he’s grateful for!
Image: Matt Zheng
Image: Eunice Lee
Image: Eunice Lee