This had the partially intended benefit of also making it so it only triggers when you walk RIGHT UP to it, which since it’s in my living room, is a plus (neither me, nor my significant other want it going off ALL the time). Because I’d already printed everything, I started off just having the sensor peak out the top of the back panel (so pointing straight up). Ultimately, I added a motion sensor to also trigger HAL. A few days of printing all of the pieces, a little bit of gluing and painting (the ring around the arcade button required some silver paint), printing the decal and I was more or less ‘done’. After organizing/formatting them as the DF-Player Mini prefers, I popped them on an SD card and had a functional HAL.
While I obviously could have done all of this with a non-Wi-Fi board and handled all of the control locally, I SPECIFICALLY wanted everything connected and controlled by my Home Assistant instance (partly to add to the ‘sentience’ of my HAL, but also so I could add all sorts of other sensors for use in other automation projects since he’s located in such a central hub of my home).įor the audio clips I spent some time finding and downloading all the best HAL quotes/clips I could find from the movie and then cleaned up those that had lots of background noise (primarily ones from the end of the movie). I used an ESP8266 as the brains and used ESPHome to ‘program’ it, using a DF-Player Mini for the audio with some small speakers powered directly by it. I knew from the beginning that at a minimum I wanted it to be able to play audio clips of HAL and the use of the arcade button made the triggering of that even easier (although I also ended up supplementing this with a motion sensor). I also ultimately chose to design my own case from scratch, as it’s such a simple design to begin with and it would be easier to make my own customizations (plus, sometimes it’s just more fun to make something all yourself). It slowly morphed from a standalone prop, to a case for the raspberry pi that’s running my Home Assistant instance to a standalone device CONNECTED to my Home Assistant instance with myriad sensors.
I ran across some designs using a 4” arcade button, which looked really good and solved the only part of the build that wasn’t 3D-printable (not to mention it was essentially full-scale). I started off doing some casual searching for other folks’ creations, figuring I could print something up really fast based on another’s design.