Meet my familiar, Archimedes! He’s a robotic owl who sits on my shoulder and detects the emotions of people around me. Then he gives feedback via colored lights and little beep-boops. He can move and look around, too — thanks to a pan/tilt servo gimbal with an Arduino controlling the motors. THE BRAIN The first part of the build is assembling the Google AIY Vision kit. This “DIY AI” introductory kit forms Archimedes’ brain and sensory system: a Raspberry Pi Zero W with “bonnet” add-on, camera, piezo speaker, and multicolor light-up button. Its fold-together cardboard enclosure is really fun to assemble. Just follow Google’s official instructions to put the kit together, and test the setup to make sure it works. You should be able to run the default Joy Detector demo without any extra coding, but of course, you can tweak it if you want — it’s written in […]

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