Channel your inner Targaryen by building this voice-activated, colour-changing, 3D-printed Drogon before watching the next episode of Game of Thrones.

Winter has come

This is a spoiler-free zone! I’ve already seen the new episode of season 8, but I won’t ruin anything, I promise.

Even if you’ve never watched an episode of Game of Thrones (if so, that’s fine, I don’t judge you), you’re probably aware that the final season has started.

And you might also know that the show has dragons in it — big, hulking, scaley dragons called Rhaegal, Viserion, and Drogon. They look a little something like this:

Well, not anymore. They look like this now:

Raspberry Pi voice-responsive dragon!

The creator of this project goes by the moniker Botmation. To begin with, they 3D printed modified a Drogon model they found on Thingiverse. Then, with Dremel in hand, they modified the print, to replace its eyes with RGB LEDs. Before drawing the LEDs through the hollowed-out body of the model, they soldered them to wires connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W‘s GPIO pins.

Located in the tin beneath Drogon, the Pi Zero W is also equipped with a microphone and runs the Python code for the project. And thanks to Google’s Speech to Text API, Drogon’s eyes change colour whenever a GoT character repeats one of two keywords: white turns the eyes blue, while fire turns them red.

If you’d like more information about building your own interactive Drogon, here’s a handy video. At the end, Botmation asks viewers to help improve their code for a cleaner voice-activation experience.

Drogon for the throne!

I’ve managed to bag two of the three dragons in the Pi Towers Game of Thrones fantasy league, so I reckon my chances of winning are pretty good thanks to all the points I’ll rack up by killing White Walker.

Wait — does killing a White Walker count as a kill, since they’re already dead?

Ah, crud.