BMO

The Project

It's a little robot/videogame console inspired by the Adventure Time TV show. BMO is made out of spray painted ABS and has a very cute 3.5 inch LCD display. BMO is powered by a Raspberry Pi zero and the Google Voice HAT, which has slots for two speakers and servos for the arms. The little screen is soldered under the Pi Zero in the analog tv pins, the screen was a little car display modified to run on 5V. BMO uses Whisper API Text-to-speech algorithm to grant BMO the ability to "understand" you and answer in appropriate manner, with animations and sometimes jokes. BMO also runs Retropie with a custom theme, which allows you to manage files and start up some games. BMO also has a custom game that i coded myself, it's called Jake Pong (yes, very original, i know) It's still a work in progress though, the front buttons are missing and BMO does not have any arms or legs yet.

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Team Comments

I grew up watching AT and BMO was my favorite character. Some years ago I found a video of a guy named Bob Herzberg, who made one with a Pi Zero and custom boards. I really liked the project and tried to follow his tutorials to make my own, which turned out very different from the original.

The most difficult part was modifying the display to work with the Pi zero, it was my first time using a soldering iron and I destroyed a bunch of screens in my early attempts, thankfully there were lots of tutorials on YouTube to help.

If I had more time I would code more BMO Specific games, so far they only have 1.