Quick Start & Deployment

Step-by-step instructions to configure, install, and run the WaveGo Whisper-bot platform on any compatible hardware.

🤖 WaveGo Hardware Platform

The Whisper Bot is built on top of the Waveshare WaveGo Quadruped Robot. It interfaces a Raspberry Pi controller with the robot's ESP32 locomotion board.

Circuit Connection Schematic:

WaveGo ESP32 Board and Raspberry Pi Circuit Connection

💿 OS Flashing & Setup

Prepare your Raspberry Pi's bootable SD card/SSD with one of the following recommended setups:

Option 1: Raspberry Pi OS

Download and use the official flashing utility:

Get RPi Imager

Option 2: Ubuntu OS

Download Ubuntu Server/Desktop and flash using:

Rufus|balenaEtcher

📱 Mobile Controller App

Whisper-bot features a companion Flutter-based mobile dashboard for real-time video telemetry, drawing inputs for the LeNet-5 CNN digit recognizer, local Gemma3 chat interface, and bionic motor status polling.

Download Android Client

Download the pre-compiled production release APK directly to your Android device:

⬇️ Download app-release.apk

Build output size: ~57.0 MB • Requires Android 8.0 (Oreo) or higher.

📦 Automated Installer Setup

The project includes an install.sh script that updates packages, configures groups, installs python requirements, and downloads public models.

Shell Installation Commands:

# 1. Clone the project repository
git clone https://github.com/Abbilaash/WaveGo.git
cd WaveGo/whisper-bot

# 2. Grant execution permissions and run the installer
chmod +x install.sh
./install.sh

⚠️ Important permission reload required:

The script adds the active user to the dialout group to access the serial interface. You must log out and back in, reboot, or run su - $USER for permissions to take effect.

⚙️ systemd Background Automation

Service Setup Commands:

# 1. Copy the systemd service descriptor to the configuration folder
sudo cp whisper-bot.service /etc/systemd/system/

# 2. Reload the systemd daemon to recognize the new configuration
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

# 3. Enable the service to run on startup
sudo systemctl enable whisper-bot.service

# 4. Start the service manually
sudo systemctl start whisper-bot.service

Useful logs and status commands:

# Inspect the status and execution state of the bot
sudo systemctl status whisper-bot.service

# View live execution logs using journalctl
journalctl -u whisper-bot.service -f