Maker duo Addison Waller and Alexander Straub are using our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pi, to power a collaborative project of theirs known as Debuggy Ducky. This duck is more than your typical rubber ducky bathtime pal, it’s an interactive smart duck that can help you debug your code while you program using ChatGPT. In fact, you probably shouldn’t put it anywhere near water at all.
Debuggy Ducky uses voice-to-text and text-to-speech to interact with users. Waller and Straub also threw in some extra features that complement the ChatGPT integration and make it more of a virtual assistant. The end result is this adorable duck, augmented by the power of artificial intelligence.
The main goal of Debuggy Ducky is to serve as a convenient platform for troubleshooting code. To use Debuggy Ducky, all you have to do is activate a touch sensor to enable the listening mode. Audio is then translated into text which is then passed over to ChatGPT. Users can also make use of a timer and basic audio recorder functions.
The main board powering this project is a Raspberry Pi 4. It’s connected to a few touch sensors, LEDs, and even a servo that allows the head to move. A simple USB microphone and speaker are used for audio input and output. A custom mount was 3D printed to keep the hardware in place within the duck’s body.
The main operating system used in this project was Raspberry Pi OS. It automatically launches the custom software developed by Waller and Straub when Debuggy Ducky boots. You can find more details about how it works and look at the source code for yourself over at GitHub.
If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, check out the project page over at Hackster. You can also see it in action in a demo video shared on YouTube.
