This Raspberry Pi Robot Brings Holiday Cheer — If You Donate to Help the Homeless
Make a donation to help the homeless this holiday season and this cute robot will celebrate with a song, a dance, or a joke.
Pseudonymous streamer "owntheweb" has created a Raspberry Pi-powered robot to ring in the holiday season — and, hopefully, raise some money to help the homeless, too.
"I upgraded a bot project to include holiday lights, telling bot jokes in the window, and singing one of five custom songs when folks donate to a local homeless shelter," owntheweb explains of the build. "It makes my neighbors laugh and makes me laugh when I hear someone going by to say, 'WTF?!'"
The robot, which boasts a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer as its torso and individually-controllable arms, LED strip eyes, and an LED matrix mouth, was originally built to act as a co-host for a planned gaming stream. In its new guise, it lives in the window ready to entertain passers-by — and those donating to trigger its playback, via a live-stream camera.
"The bot is deployed via Balena.io, running a Node[.js] Express server that delivers audio and timed events to a web page (mouth movements, servo control, [NeoPixel] lighting control, relay control, etc.)," owntheweb explains. "That page loads/runs 'headless' on another Pi [a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+] that's connected to a sound bar that sits on the front porch. The bot also contains a Python socket.io server listening for animation events, which implements the actual bot movements/visuals."
The robot is triggered when donations are received on owntheweb's Pledge page, though only between the hours of 1500-2000 MST. All donations are given to the Springs Rescue Mission, a charitable effort which aims to offer the homeless food, shelter, and rehabilitation programs including job training.
Those interested in learning more can visit owntheweb's Reddit thread or make a donation on the project's Pledge page.
