If there’s one thing that the Raspberry Pi is known for, it's the versatility it provides in home automation projects. Today we’re sharing an incredible creation by a developer known as Henri Rantanen from Nerdaxic at YouTube. He’s managed to bring GLaDOS, everyone's favorite antagonist from Valve’s Portal, to life using a Raspberry Pi.
Rantanen explains his desire was to turn “the most evil thing in the universe into a light switch.”
With a little bit of work and a 3D printer, Rantanen has managed to create a life-like GLaDOS head with a Raspberry Pi inside that operates as a voice assistant. In addition to looking and sounding like GLaDOS, it also features a variety of servos to animate the eye on the front. It can protrude forward, pull back and blink.
The hardware runs primarily off an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 module. It’s backed up with a ReSpeaker Mic Array V2.0 board, a Teensy 4, and a Pololu Micro Maestro servo controller. A round GC9A01 LCD screen commonly found in smartwatches is used for the eye.
The most exciting aspect of the project is the GLaDOS voice feature. Rantanen created a custom Python-based voice assistant to recreate the sound of her voice. You can get a closer look at how it works by checking out the source code at GitHub.
Check out the demo video shared to YouTube for an in-depth look at how it works and be sure to follow Nerdaxic for more cool projects.
