Billy O Sullivan's Armatron Is a Modular, 3D-Printable, Raspberry Pi-Powered Take on the Pip-Boy

Maker Billy O Sullivan has put together a "Personal Augmentation Platform" dubbed the Armatron, built around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and designed to be worn on the arm as an interface to hardware sensors.

"The Armatron is my own version of a [Fallout] Pip-Boy," O Sullivan explains. "You see, about a year ago when I got myself a new 3d printer, the Prusa Mark 3, I tried to make a Pip-Boy based on the designs laid out by Adafruit. Unfortunately that Pip-Boy was kind of… well it looked really good [but] it didn't actually do anything, and I wanted something more functional. I figured in this day and age we should probably be able to do a bit more than have something that just looks the part."

The result of that musing: the Armatron, a functional wearable powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer. An on-board OLED display acts as the primary user interface, while modular sensors and other hardware can be connected to an I2C bus — beginning with support for a GPS receiver, a non-contact infrared temperature sensor, and a BME688 four-in-one environmental sensor.

"It's got this nice magnetic base mount which means you can easily take it off your wrist and pass it to your friends so they can have a look at it and play around with it," O Sullivan writes of the Armatron's features. "It's got a USB-C data port here, which isn't used yet but I do plan to use it to make the Raspberry Pi emulate a keyboard."

A full tour of the device, including its programmable LED torch mode, is available on O Sullivan's YouTube channel, while source code has been published to GitHub under the reciprocal GNU Affero General Public License 3.

3D print files for the housing and plug-in I2C modules, meanwhile, can be found on Printables under the permissive Creative Commons Attribution license.