Someone used a Raspberry Pi to create the robot of their childhood dreams, complete with creepy eyeballs

I'm just gonna say it; the robots of the modern era aren't fun. Back in the 80s and 90s, we were promised full-blown, humanoid robots that could walk, talk, look at us, and perhaps save us from a problem or two. Instead, we've got chatbots generating endless images of Mickey Mouse and posting them to Facebook. Yawn.

Fortunately, we don't have to put up with this boring, asinine timeline we find ourselves in. As one tinkerer proves, your perfect robot companion is just an SBC away, after they used a Raspberry Pi to create what their childhood self thought robots would look like in the future.

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Yes, the TOMMY-B-003 does have eyes, and yes, he will use them to stare at you

In a post on the Raspberry Pi subreddit, user "Exercising Ingenuity" showed off their newest video. It's a piece on how they created a robot called TOMMY-B-003 that had the look and feel of sci-fi shows in the late 20th century. This includes eyes that look at you as he talks, an oscilloscope that moves when he speaks, and, of course, a CRT screen to display stuff on. I'm being totally honest, I'd actually use Copilot if it looked like this.

Exercising Ingenuity explained how they became inspired to make this cool project:

Over the past year I built a interactive robot that tries to fulfill my childhood ideal of what a robot should be. It builds on top of Thomas Burns' Alexatron design.

The Raspberry Pi runs the animatronics, facial recognition, and connects to the Open AI real time API for speech to speech interaction.

While TOMMY-B-003 is pretty content with replying to queries using OpenAI, Exercising Ingenuity hopes to squash an LLM onto the Raspberry Pi 4B to allow his robot to speak without an internet connection. Given how LLMs don't squeeze into a Pi too great (to the point where someone made a horrific art piece based around the topic), I'd like to see how TOMMY-B-003's responses will change in terms of quality and speed, especially when the Pi is handling all the other moving parts too.

Would you believe me if I told you that this wasn't the first time I've seen a Raspberry Pi project that stares at you with artificial eyes? If you don't, you need to check out this creepy Raspberry Pi-powered 3D eye that tracks you with AI and these 3D-printed animatronic eyes. Here's looking at you, kid.