Mamma Mia! It’s an AI Pasqually!

Nothing in this world could simultaneously delight and terrify a child of the 1980s like a performance from Munch's Make Believe Band. The creepy, uncanny movements of the animatronic actors in this show at Chuck E. Cheese fueled nightmares for months to come, yet their frightening glares also accompanied an abundance of pizza and video gaming, the likes of which had never been seen before. Totally worth it.

Those that grew up during this time are sure to think that they are past such juvenile and baseless fears now. But Andrew Langley just shattered that belief and proved that these robots are in fact still really, really creepy. As in clown-level creepy. Drunk with hubris, Langley decided to restore a Pasqually P. Pieplate character, and, get this… build artificial intelligence (AI) into it! Oh man! This is way worse than Skynet! Board up your houses while there is still time!

The project began when Langley came across a decades-old Cyberamic animatronic on eBay. Though it had seen better days, the metal frame and most of the air cylinders used for movement were intact. Lacking the reel-to-reel computer system originally used to bring the robot to life, Langley opted to reimagine the character rather than do a pure restoration. What followed was a total teardown and retrofit of the original 1981 hardware, replacing its aging circuitry with a modern brain powered by a Raspberry Pi 4.

A custom circuit board interfaces the Raspberry Pi, via a 26-pin ribbon cable, to a VV5Q11 solenoid manifold. This manifold directs compressed air through Tailonz regulators into Pasqually’s pneumatic cylinders, enabling movement. Langley even gave Pasqually a number of movements not available in the original design, such as a head tilt, elbow bends, and independent arm motion. Pasqually can now even do a full torso lean for some dramatic flair (or terror, depending on your perspective).

Driving all of this is a Python-based control system running on Raspberry Pi OS. A Flask web server hosts an HTML frontend, allowing users to control Pasqually’s movements, play songs, view PSI readings, manage Wi-Fi connections, and more — all from a custom web-based interface.

That is all good and well so far, but as previously mentioned, Langley had to go and build AI into old Pasqually. Porcupine handled wake word detection, and Rhino speech-to-intent was leveraged for limited offline control features. When connected to the internet, Pasqually can use Google’s speech-to-text API to capture a user’s request, reply with ChatGPT or DeepSeek, and speak in a voice cloned from original recordings thanks to Elevenlabs. When offline, Pico text-to-speech is able to handle speech synthesis.

Alternatively, control can be handled via a USB gamepad or MIDI sequencer. Since Pasqually is now equipped with MIDI input/output support, it is possible to record and program entire shows by syncing events with audio tracks.

Langley has plans to further localize the AI processing in the future, possibly using Whisper for real-time transcription and improving offline voice quality. For now, the robot is semi-dependent on cloud services.

Whether this is a passion project or a first step toward the animatronic uprising, one thing is certain: Pasqually lives again. And this time, he is powered by AI.