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.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
