Raspberry Pi Beats Wordscapes with 3D Printer and AI

Raspberry Pi
(Image credit: Chase Roberts)

Developer Chase Roberts is so good at Wordscapes, he’s beating it in his sleep. Albeit, with the help of a really cool Raspberry Pi project! If you’re not familiar with the popular app, players must complete a crossword of sorts using a wheel of letters at the bottom of the screen.

To pull this off, Roberts is controlling his 3D printer, an Ender 3, with a Raspberry Pi 4. Mounted to where you would normally find an extruder is a stylus pen. A camera is used to capture the phone screen for processing each move.

Some of the best Raspberry Pi projects we’ve seen implement artificial intelligence (AI). According to Roberts, he had to develop his own model for the machine learning algorithm by creating a template for each letter. The setup was accurate enough to get the job done but would occasionally confuse similar letters like E and F.

Once optimized, the sky was the limit—or at least the expected level cap was. Roberts left the game running for as long as it could go and after 21 days it managed to reach level 16,000. To get a closer look at the code used in this project, check out the phonebot project page at GitHub.

Visit the original Reddit thread for more details as well as a brief Q&A from developer Chase Roberts, himself.

Ash Hill
Freelance News and Features Writer

Ash Hill is a Freelance News and Features Writer 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.