The mysterious box is a tangible way to explain the principles of machine learning by placing a simple neural network on some hardware.
n.b. this is very much a work-in-progress.
The neural network runs on an Espressive ESP32 microcontroller. This is a reasonably powerful device that includes support for wifi and bluetooth along with other useful bits and pieces built in.
To build and deploy the software you'll need to use PlatformIO. While these instructions assume you're doing everything at the command line, PlatformIO also has its own IDE and integration into a wide range of existing development environments.
ESP32 is Arduino-compatible and the Mysterious Box has been written using the Arduino framework. As a result it is possible to use the Arduino IDE instead of PlatformIO; having tried both, my advice is that PlatformIO is at least an order of magnitude easier in the long run. Finally note that ESP32 can also be programmed using the offical ESP-IDF toolchain but I chose Arduino to make the software more portable.
PlatformIO is a Python-based tool and I like to run it in virtualenv. Feel free to skip if you're installing / have installed PlatformIO using a different method.
You'll need to have installed Python 2, pip, and virtualenv. When running for the first time you need to initialise the environment and use pip to install dependencies:
virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
From here on you can source env/bin/activate to start the virtual environment after which you can run platformio (provided that you've pulled dependencies using pip already).
Just build
platformio run
Build and upload
platformio upload
Run the tests - this builds a new image and uploads it so that tests are run on the device
platformio test