Week 3 Progress Update

What We Worked On

This week, we made solid progress on the core user interface of our system. Our current UI now allows users to:

• 🔄 Refresh and view live weather data

• 📰 Fetch the latest news headlines

• 🎶 Begin integrating music search functionality using a public API

UI Interface

All of these features are being tied together into a unified visual experience, ensuring that our final product is intuitive and accessible — especially for elderly users who may prefer simple touch-based interactions.

Hardware & Enclosure Progress

Alongside software development, we’ve also started preparing the physical structure for our final prototype. This week, one of our teammates scouted and selected a 3D-printable case design that fits both the Raspberry Pi 4 and the 7” touchscreen display.

The case design was sourced from Thingiverse (credit to luc_e) and will provide a clean, compact enclosure for our system, keeping components neat and secure.

The design includes space for USB access, allowing us to connect the ReSpeaker microphone and webcam easily. There are also plans to 3D print a custom microphone holder to enhance the visual integration.

We’ll begin testing the case fit and stability next week and iterate if needed.

What’s Coming Next

We’re shifting focus toward interactive, typed input for the upcoming week. Here’s what we plan to implement:

• A new button that, when pressed, opens a text input box

• Users will be able to type a command such as:

  “play music related to summer”And the system will immediately search and play the music

• We’ll also implement essential music controls:

  • ⏮️ Go Back

  • ⏸️ Stop & Resume

  • ⏭️ Skip Track

This will allow users to get real results instantly based on their input.

Planning Ahead

Once the typed-command interface is working smoothly, we’ll move on to integrating the speech-to-text (STT) functionality via the ReSpeaker Dual Microphone HAT.

Eventually, users will be able to speak commands like:

“Tell me the weather or “Play relaxing music”, without touching a keyboard.

IBM SkillsBuild + Design Thinking

The foundation for this week’s features draws directly from the “Build Your Own AI Assistant” course on IBM SkillsBuild. We've been applying what we learned to structure logic flows, create modular UI functions, and think in terms of user journeys.