Maker builds Raspberry Pi-powered Rick and Morty watch to remotely control smart home

Raspberry Pi controlled smart homes are cool enough on their own but Donutsorelse has kicked things up a notch with this awesome Rick and Morty-themed wrist watch control system! This Raspberry Pi wearable is integrated with AI for a seamless experience, enabling Donutsorelse to control a variety of smart home services in his home—as well as a few Rock and Morty easter eggs, like an awesome Mr. Meeseeks box.

According to Donutsorelse, this was part of a Halloween costume in which he was dressed up as Rick. The idea was to create something that wasn’t just useful but also complimented the costume with features that would behave just like one of Rick’s many inventions. This meant the integration of AI to help with sentence interpretation when registering voice commands.

Donutsorelse is using the word “butler” as a keyword to trigger commands. The Raspberry Pi is working alongside a DFRobot Unihiker board which is responsible for listening for audio input. It’s connected to a Blues Notecarrier F card, adding remote support which means you can use the device pretty much anywhere as long as it has a signal—presumably in this universe, at least. There is also a Flask server at play that manages the various requests and integrates the AI API.

The Raspberry Pi used in this project is a Compute Module 4 as part of an M5Stack CM4Stack Development Kit but Donutsorelse insists you could use a Raspberry Pi 3 B instead. It’s working alongside the DFRobot Unihiker which has a touchscreen and the BluesNotecarrier F that provides the cellular wireless support.

A Python script is responsible for managing much of the overall workflow. It utilizes OpenAI to help with understanding voice requests. This makes it possible to say things like “Butler, turn on all of the lights.” instead of requiring specific explanations like “Butler, turn on the living room light, turn on the hallway light, turn on the kitchen light.”

If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, you can check out the build details over at Hackster. There you’ll also find lots of information about its assembly as well as the source code.