My Toxic Pet Cat

setup
raspberry pi + motor driver setup
Original CAD
setup
Hand-drawn sprite

Inspiration

Ever had a terrible day? Or maybe the best day of your life? Honestly, it doesn't matter, because according to cats, your feelings are entirely irrelevant. We wanted to capture that beautifully toxic, endlessly judgmental feline energy. Enter My Toxic Pet Cat: a companion you can always depend on to give you the ultimate side-eye, rain or shine.

What it does

It’s your very own judgmental desk companion! You can vent, rant, or brag to the cat, and it will respond—not just with pure verbal sass, but with physical, "cat-ly" movement. It is the physical embodiment of "I'm listening, but I'm absolutely not impressed."

Challenges we ran into

The cat we CAD-ed (pun intended) turned out to be too large to print, so we were unable to use our original mechanical design, which was to hide the Raspberry Pi inside the hollow of the cat.

The motor drivers were broken, which tested our sanity for a while. As well, the motors did not quite have enough power to drive our somewhat heavy bot. We had to resolder the motors several times.

Connecting the python backend to our beautifully made html frontend was a giant pain.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using the ElevenLabs API took way less time than we thought.

We were able to get a functional bot with movement and AI working just before Valentine's Day ended! (Naturally, things broke shortly after, because that's just how cats are...)

What we learned

We learned about API calls, Raspberry Pis, and how to effectively use AI in coding.

On a more sentimental note: "Debugging is a step-by-step process." We were super grateful for the mentor who patiently led us through the debugging of the motor driver step by step when we were incredibly frustrated! We learned true patience (which you definitely need if you own a cat).

What's next for My Toxic Pet Cat

Minimize the design so that it is the size of a coffee mug, and so that regular motors can actually power the bot.

Make the bot do more complex motions, maybe even show emotion... though mostly disdain, obviously!

Project description

Meet My Toxic Pet Cat, the ultimate judgmental desk companion built to give you side-eye whether you're having the best or worst day of your life. This hardware hack brings the beautifully apathetic energy of a real feline to life using a Raspberry Pi, robotics, and generative AI.

Here’s how it works: You speak to the cat, and the Raspberry Pi captures your voice, converting it to text. We feed that text into the ChatGPT API, specially prompted to generate a sassy, condescending response. The ElevenLabs API then transforms this text into crisp, deadpan audio. To make it truly dynamic, we tied the amplitude of the audio output directly to our motor drivers—the louder the sass, the more the cat physically moves!

We successfully engineered a fully functional, AI-powered robotic pet that listens, talks back, and moves. It’s the perfect physical embodiment of "I'm listening, but I'm absolutely not impressed."