Fortuna

finished product on display at local museum!!
some more modifications
naked art sculpture at local museum
some modifications
finished integration of electronics

Inspiration

Nowadays people are going through a lot, the pandemic and lockdowns with social distancing have taken a toll on the mental well being of many many people around the world. So here is some good old fashioned fortune telling, by a robot because why not? A local art museum is doing a tech x art exhibit, and has graciously offered me the opportunity to bring my robotic fortune teller to life by incorporating it into one of their sculptures!

What it does

this is a multimodal fortune teller and general oracle of good advice. if you cannot seek it out in person, you can call or even text it and you will be bestowed with good advice and good fortunes. If you are able to visit it in person, going near it will awaken the know it all robot, and then good advice and happy fortunes await you!

How I built it

hardware: raspberry pi, screen, hrs04 proximity sensor to detect presence of a person. Google AIY voice kit microphone and speakers, pi camera software: google cloud speech recognition. google cloud text to speech, twilio, twiml, python, flask, ngrok the basic fortune telling and advising functionality is handled by software, the text and calling give the same advice and fortunes as the in person exhibit

Challenges I ran into

originally i wanted to use the pi camera to detect people and compliment them on their clothes,however the low resources of the pi introduced a severe lag which took away from the interactivity so i didnt follow up on that plan