A Raspberry Pi, Google Assistant, and Laser Combine to Display Glowing Weather Reports

The entire purpose of home voice assistants, like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, is to provide you with an easy way to find out information and streamline your life. But, some of that information is better shown than told, and nobody wants to listen to a five minute weather report. That’s why the Echo Show exists, but Redditor TuckerPi’s glowing laser display is a heckuva lot cooler.

Tucker’s Laser Pi is built around a sheet of glow-in-the-dark film that glows after being exposed to bright light, just like those stars that kids stick on their ceilings. Normally, the entire surface is exposed more or less completely, so the sheet has a uniform glow. But, if the light is focused with a laser, it can be used to create glowing drawings that slowly fade. Tucker harnessed that phenomenon to build a glow-in-the-dark display that’s connected to a Google Assistant.

The Laser Pi works by directing a small 5mW 405nm laser pointer in the X and Y axes with two low-torque stepper motors. Those are connected through stepper motor drivers to the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi Zero W. A Python script controls the steppers, and Google Assistant, IFTTT, and Adafruit IO are used to take in voice commands and output the data that can then be translated into paths for the laser to follow. Tucker can ask his Google Assistant to show the weather, for instance, and it will be drawn by the laser in glowing light, which is a lot more fun that a regular LCD display.