Halloween season always inspires tons of cool Raspberry Pi projects and we're always tickled to share them with our readers. Today we've got another cool example to show off, this one created by maker and developer Poke08. Using our favorite SBC, he's put together an impressively spooky Halloween eye.
This eye does a lot more than just look cool, it's interactive, as well. It's designed to move automatically, darting around the room keeping locked on targets. Poke08 programmed the eye to identify people and keep its gaze focused on them the whole time. Not only does it keep a creepy focus on passers-by, it also speaks using text-to-speech.
Poke080 shared a demo video of the Halloween eye in action. In it, we get a good look at the eye's movement and ability to track targets. It's illuminated from the inside with RGB LEDs to glow red, occasionally flashing green. It could theoretically be programmed to say anything but in the video, we hear a nice welcoming "Happy Halloween!"
The main board driving this optical illusion is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. It's connected to a couple of stepper motors and a camera module in the middle of the Iris. The hardware is mounted inside of a 3D printed body that Poke08 printed using a Creality Ender 3 Pro—a printer we reviewed with a rating of 4 out of 5 stars.
The face tracking is handled using a Google USB Coral Accelerator. This provides the Pi Zero 2W with a little extra power for AI processing using an Edge TPU coprocessor. To tackle the facial recognition, Poke08 is using CodeProject.AI, a free and open source AI server that can run locally using Windows or a Docker container.
The new Raspberry PI AI Camera could be used for a project like this. It has the power to track people, and the GPIO can be used to drive the stepper motors (via a driver board) and the RGB LED.
If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project in action, you can check it out over at YouTube and read more about its construction in the threads Poke08 shared to Reddit.
