A Raspberry Pi and Google Assistant Are Perfect for a DIY HAL 9000
Zach decided he wanted to experience terror in his own home, and so he built his own HAL 9000 using a Raspberry Pi running Google Assistant.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 file 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most famous and well-respected science fiction movies of all time. If you’ve seen it, you know that it can be quite dense. But there are many iconic moments in the film that have become important pieces of pop culture history. One legendary scene from the movie features a primate wielding a bone club and is set to Richard Strauss’s imposing Also sprach Zarathustra. The most famous moment, however, is probably when HAL 9000 ominously says “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Zach decided he wanted to experience that terror in his own home, and so he built his own HAL 9000 using a Raspberry Pi running Google Assistant.
Google Assistant is an artificially-intelligent virtual assistant, which is perfect for replicating HAL 9000 — a sentient computer that is the key antagonist character in both Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name that was released along with the film. In the film, HAL 9000 is represented by a panel housing a speaker and a camera lens with a foreboding red light in the center. Zach’s 3D-printed enclosure has the same aesthetics, including a red LED surrounded by a clear plastic dome to mirror the camera lens in the film.
Inside of that enclosure, Zach used a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, a USB microphone, a 10mm red LED and accompanying resistor, and a momentary push button. That button is mounted next to springs, and is triggered when the user pushes on the faux camera lens. Google Assistant can be easily installed on a Raspberry Pi, and Zach used the standard installation method to set it up. Sound is piped from the Raspberry Pi’s 3.5mm audio jack to a set of speakers. This Google Assistant installation doesn’t have any special functionality — it works just like it would on a Google Home device or your phone. But that does have some fun HAL 9000 easter eggs that you can play with. We just hope that Zach doesn’t need to open any pod bay doors.