Captain PirateBot

Inspiration

We just thought of creating a physical chatbot, rather than just one in the browser, to provide a more interactive experience so it feels like you're talking to a real person.

What it does

You can not only chat with it, but also control it's arms through servo motors, and always keep eye contact with you with it's face tracking technology. It includes an Arduino, one camera, a few servos, and two JavaScript files running on a laptop.

How we built it

James spent the entire time figuring out the dimensions, measuring, cutting, gluing all the pieces together. Also making sure all the moving mechanical parts worked nicely. While Tyler created the code for the simple web input interface, the node.js script as like the backend, the Arduino script, and the communication between all of these in real time.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into loads of challenges, including hardware issues particularly with some of the servos, coding issues, mainly with just getting the AI response to play back with sound, and communication between the scripts were sometimes difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of getting the face tracking to work, because it required a lot of patience and time to figure out how to put all the pieces together. In the end, it works pretty well and we're both happy about it.

What we learned

We learned that debugging hardware problems, mainly around the Arduino, can be a real pain, especially when you don't know if it's the code or the hardware itself.