The Terminator (T-800 to its friends) has retired from beating up bikers, taunting T-1000 and looking for Sarah Connor. Its skull now rests atop maker Mike Darby’s desk. Distrustful as ever of humans, Terminator’s skull has a Raspberry Pi 4 brain, a Raspberry Pi camera in one of its eye sockets, and can detect, listen to, and…have a terrifying chat with people who cross its path.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB (You’ll need a powerful Raspberry Pi to handle all the machine learning)
• Pimoroni Camera Module for Raspberry Pi Zero
• Seeed Studio Grove speaker
• Adafruit Braincraft HAT (makes machine learning on Raspberry Pi super-easy)
• A red LED to throw into the eye socket you’re not using for the camera
• And you need to find a nice-looking Terminator skull

Terminator goes back to school

Terminator’s new career as a desktop spy has made it incredibly smart, allowing it to perform multiple machine-learnt functions at once. It can be watching and analysing while replying to a question, with the events captured by the eye camera going into a queue to be processed after the reply.

This isn’t Mike’s first rodeo, and most of the base code structure builds off The Nvidianator, his first iteration of a smart Terminator skull. This upgrade draws upon various machine learning and chatbot scripts. He explains all in this tutorial.

Spider-Man themed costume change

Mike decided T-800 wasn’t powerful enough on its own so he adorned it with a pair of Raspberry Pi Zero W-powered E.d.i.t.h. glasses. These smart glasses allow Terminator’s skull to take photos and analyse who is in them. They also feature an onboard news scraper so they can fetch the latest headlines and read them out to you via Bluetooth earphones. It’s always important to stay on top of current affairs while you’re wreaking global havoc.

@Raspberry_Pi powered Terminator wearing also Pi powered Edith glasses #marvel #terminator https://t.co/1fGbvohPCKhttps://t.co/r9vCZf6RQb pic.twitter.com/OjhNhUJqzw

— Michael Darby – 314Reactor (@The_Mikey_D) July 22, 2022

This tutorial walks you through how to build your own pair of E.d.i.t.h. glasses. You’ll need a sturdy, well-made pair of frames, Raspberry Pi Zero W, a small LCD screen, a teeny-tiny USB microphone, and a camera lens. An Adafruit PowerBoost 500 Charger keeps everything going.

Follow Mike for more tech projects

Subscribe to Mike’s YouTube channel 314Reactor for more Terminator-based fun. The Tech Projects playlist is probably where you want to be. He has also made RGB lightsabers and knows his way around a hacked NERF gun. We’re a little bit smitten.