The Future Has Not Been Written.

In the Terminator films we are given glimpses of the future wars; with bipedal robotic skeletons, flying drones and ground tanks (known as HK’s – Hunter Killers) hunting down humans – Check out the Terminator Wiki.

DFRobot contacted me the other month and asked if I wanted to try out some of their stuff – I had a look through their products and found this awesome robot chassis: Gladiator. They sent it to me and while building it I realised the design was starting to resemble a HK tank mentioned above:

So I decided to chuck some extra hardware at it alongside some cool machine learning stuff and really make a cool representation of the HK in Arduino/Raspberry Pi form.

So thanks to DFRobot for most of the gear in this project! Check them out at DFRobot.com

Lets dive right in…

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Knee-Deep in the Project

I went to a store the other week and found a cool Skeleton in their Halloween section, I immediately thought; that’s got enough room in it for some hardware… images of a spooky cool Raspberry Pi/Arduino powered Revenant inspired Cyber-Skeleton came to my mind through a UAC-like portal.

I thought it would be awesome to have a skeleton that could move its mouth, light up an LED eyeball and even take some pictures (with some ML on top) as a cool geeky and DOOM inspired Halloween prop.

Revenants in DOOM are basically cybernetically enhanced demon skeletons – you can find out more about these awesome things from here.

So depending on your preference, put on some music from Bobby Prince, Aubrey Hodges, Mick Gordon or Andrew Hulshult and David Levy and let’s dive into The Revenant!

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Metal Gear?!

Key Goals:

1. Make a Nerf Blaster than can only be fired by users with an authorised fingerprint
2. Be able to get sensor data on the user and environment
3. Be able to remotely administer the system

I’ve had the idea now for some time to make a Metal Gear Solid 4 inspired project based on the SOP System that’s in the game – so when Digitspace asked me if I had any project ideas I told them about it and they were happy to sponsor the project and give me the parts! So thanks to them for enabling me to make this project!

So, in a nutshell the SOP System in game is a system than controls all military hardware and ensures that unauthorised users can’t utilise tools if they aren’t registered on the system.

For further explanation check out the in game cut-scene with extra details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FePHnxmupCw

So with the project plan and parts from Digitspace I constructed the hardware around a Nerf Blaster and got to work!

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But not really.

So of course it’s not really a GBC playing Doom Eternal it’s my Gameboy Raspberry Pi that I made way back in 2017 using Moonlight to stream from my gaming PC to the Raspberry Pi within the GBC shell.

With the release of the (awesome) Doom Eternal I thought it was time to try and play this on that same hardware for a bit of fun.

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What and Why

I’ve always been fascinating by the idea of moving ones mind to a robot to live forever as a machine so I thought what better time to start the seeds of this with a nice bit of Raspberry Pi work with TensorFlow and a Muse brainwave reading Headset – starting off simple and working my way up:

Key Goals:

1. Read brainwave data.
2. Use TensorFlow to train a model on brainwave data to determine a relaxed or a non-relaxed mindset.
3. Use information gathered from this as a jumping off point to see what else can be read from the mind.

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I find your lack of faith disturbing.

A couple of years ago I made an Arduino Lightsaber that could have custom colours applied to it with a colour sensor, it was a messy build and the colours weren’t so great and since then I’ve been thinking of ways I could improve; with the release of Episode IX just recently I thought it was the perfect time to make another one!

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New Element

With the recent mix-ups between Sony and Disney about Spider-Man and hopefully the resolution, I thought it was a good time to make an Arc Reactor Project; I had the Mark IV chassis 3D printed thanks to Shapeways and I used this design off of Thingiverse, which was made by Thingiverse User: andi1024.

3d Printed part (no changes made): https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:321658
From user: https://www.thingiverse.com/andi1024/designs
Under the creative commons attribution license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Then got to work!

Key Goals:

1. Make an aesthetically pleasing Arc Reactor from Iron Man 2
2. Make it wearable

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Summer Meltdown

It’s that time of year again where things are too hot for computers running heavy loads – you can try Oil-Cooling or you can even try Putting your Raspberry Pi in a freezer but sometimes you just need a good old fashioned heat sink and fan.

Usually Raspberry Pi’s are cooled with little heat sinks such as these and this whereas desktop PC’s (particularly higher end rigs) have more of these  kinds of heat sink/fans to cool them.

Seeed Studio contacted me and offered to send me their new product; the ICE Tower CPU Cooling Fan for Raspberry Pi 4 for review. I said yes and they sent me it in record time. So a massive thanks to them!

This is essentially a miniaturised version of the type of heat sink linked above; with the significantly more powerful Raspberry Pi 4 the heat output is increased quite a bit, so it is now necessary to use such a device to really keep the temps down.

So let’s take a look at this part in terms of assembly, aesthetics and most importantly – temperature.

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If you haven’t seen Avengers Endgame or Spider-Man Far From Home – You don’t want any part of this!

Final warning – possible spoilers ahoy!

…

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

So in Far From Home Peter gets the torch passed onto him from Stark via some super AR glasses that allow him to see real time data and call in all sorts of super Stark Industries gear.
As soon as I saw these in the film I knew I needed to do a project on them so as soon as possible I got my hands on the glasses from eBay and got to work on plans and parts.

Lets go.

It’s storing energy from the earth’s core!

1. Make aesthetically accurate EDITH Glasses from Far From Home/IW.
2. Make it display to the users eye and have speech rec capability.
3. Have it do some cool things.

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Time to talk.

I thought I should give this it’s own specific post – this is the chatbot that I’ve used in my Raspbinator and Nvidinator projects. The GitHub linked below will be updated over time as I make improvements to it.

I’ve decided on the name Chatbot 8 – as before I used GitHub I had it on my Google Drive and each iteration I increased the number; the first one I was happy to use in the Raspbinator was iteration 8 and now, the name has kind of stuck.

Key Goals:

1. To make a bot that can respond to human input, learn and return more organic responses over time.
2. To be able to be trained from large text files such as scripts for movies and transcripts of conversations.
3. Have it able to be integrated easily into other projects.

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