This Raspberry Pi project created by maker Michael Darby of 314Reactor brings the fictional world of The Terminator to life. With the help of a Raspberry Pi 4 and a slew of accessories, he’s recreated the eerie T-800 Terminator villain—but, thankfully, it’s only the skull so we’re safe…for now.
This project is housed inside of a replica prop that’s just big enough to house a full-sized Pi. In addition to the Pi, Darby has fitted the skull with a speaker for audio output and a camera module in the eye. Darby is using machine learning (ML) to synthesize speech as well as recognize objects detected via the camera module.
Darby has a big history of tinkering with microelectronics on his 314Reactor blog and often shares the projects on his channel at YouTube. Past creations include things like this wearable Iron Man-inspired Arc Reactor project (which is Arduino-based, rather than Pi-powered) and this Artificial Life LED matrix.
The details for this project were shared in full over at Hackster and so we’re able to dive into the full parts list which includes a Raspberry Pi 4 8 GB, an Adafruit Braincraft HAT, a camera module, LEDs and a speaker from Seeed Studio. The T-800 skull prop was found at a UK-based online shop known as The Cave. According to Darby, this was his third attempt at creating a working T-800 skull with previous attempts using methods like 3D-printing used to replicate the prop.
This project, along with many others created by Darby, is open source which means the code used to drive the T-800 skull is available for free for anyone to use. This source code can be found over at Darby’s official GitHub profile.
If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project or just get a closer look at how it goes together, visit the full build guide over at Hackster and check out the demo video shared to YouTube to see how it goes together.
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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.
