Vaani client

This is the front-end application for the Mozilla's Connected Devices project Vaani local.

Prerequisites

In order to run this software, you need to have a number of packages, including node and a custom version of pocketsphinx installed. There is a script in the repo that will install and build the software you need on a Raspberry Pi.

• Linux or OSX based system
• nodejs >= 4.2.x
• [sox] (http://sox.sourceforge.net/)
• Mozilla's custom sphinxbase and pocketsphinx
• You'll need a Vaani server running. If you don't have an IP address to one, you can install Vaani server and run it locally. Just make sure to update the right ip here

Installation

Before starting to install this software, it might be a good idea to make sure your system is up to date. On a Raspberry Pi, you can do that with these commands:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo reboot

First, clone this repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/mozilla/vaani.client

Before you can use the code in the repo, you must install the software it requires. On Raspberry Pi, some of this software needs to be built from source, and this can take an hour or more. Running the following script should download and install all of the software you need. (Though to be on the safe side you might want to paste the code from the script into your terminal one line at a time to make sure it all works correctly on your system.)

$ vaani.client/bootstrap-scripts/raspberry-pi-setup.sh

Now that you have the system prerequsites installed, you can install the direct dependencies for this repo.

$ cd vaani.client
$ npm install

Note that the npm install step will fail if you have not first installed the prerequsites.

Setting up your Microphone

If you're using a USB microphone on Raspberry Pi, you'll need to make sure that ALSA is configured correctly to use your microphone. This may be as simple as running this command:

sudo cp config-files/asound.conf /etc

Of course, if you have an existing asound.conf file, you should back it up first. You can test your microphone with:

$ arecord -f cd /tmp/test.wav  # record something, then Ctrl-C to quit
$ aplay /tmp/test.wav          # can you hear what you recorded?

If the volume of your recorded sound is low, you can adjust the microphone gain with:

alsamixer -c 1

The config.json File

The Vaani client reads credentials and other configuration information from a file named config.json when it starts up. You must create this file before you can run the program. Start by copying the template file:

$ cp config.json.template config.json

Then edit config.json as needed. In particular, you must specify the URL and password for the Vaani server you are using. For testing, you also need to specify an Evernote developer token in this file. (When you deploy, however, you'll want to run Vaani with the user's Evernote OAUTH token in the environment variable EVERNOTE_OAUTH_TOKEN. More on this topic below.)

Starting and Stopping Vaani

To run the Vaani client once, just to try it out:

$ node index.js

If the program exits shortly after startup, it may mean that your microphone is not configured correctly.

Stop it just by typing Ctrl-C

If you want Vaani to be managed by systemd, first copy the service file into /lib/systemd/system/:

$ sudo cp config-files/vaani.service /lib/systemd/system
$ sudo mkdir /lib/systemd/system/vaani.service.d

Once the service file is installed, you can start and stop Vaani with these commands:

$ sudo systemctl start vaani
$ sudo systemctl stop vaani

If you start Vaani this way, the program output is logged. You can view the logs with:

$ sudo journalctl -b -u vaani

If you want Vaani to run automatically every time the system boots, use this command to enable the service:

$ sudo systemctl enable vaani

Instead of enabling Vaani directly, however, you may prefer to run the Vaani setup server when the system boots and rely on it to start Vaani once it has ensured that the device has a working wifi connection. See the vaani.setup repo at https://github.com/mozilla/vaani.setup

The vaani.setup service will obtain the user's OAUTH token and use it as the value of the EVERNOTE_OAUTH_TOKEN environment variable in in /lib/systemd/system/vaani.setup.d/evernote.conf so that Vaani is started with a working oauth token.