BMO Lives!

In a show full of great characters, Adventure Time’s most lovable is BMO. The little sentient …Game Boy? Thing… is adorable and always says just the silliest things. We all want a BMO in our lives and Brenpoly actually made that happen with the help of AI.

As a true fan of Adventure Time, Brenpoly was serious about the details. He even referenced Adventure Time The Art of Ooo, which is an art book that contains illustrated diagrams of BMO’s interior — though even it is uncertain about some of the components therein.

With a thorough understanding of BMO’s anatomy to work with, Brenpoly selected the hardware for the project. That includes a Raspberry Pi 5 (16GB), a Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2, a Pimoroni NVMe Base Duo for storage, a Geekworm UPS HAT, a 5” touchscreen, a lithium battery, a USB microphone, a USB speaker, and buttons connected through an Adafruit Feather 32u4.

To help with wiring and mounting the buttons, Brenpoly designed a custom PCB in KiCAD. The 3D model of that board let him then design BMO’s body in CAD. That is a practical enclosure for the electronic components, but is also very accurate to what we see on screen. After 3D printing it, Brenpoly sanded, primed, and then painted BMO’s body in an appropriate teal blue color.

The biggest challenge, however, was giving BMO the appropriate personality. That was particularly difficult because Brenpoly wanted everything to work offline. For that reason, he chose to use Ollama to run a local LLM (Gemma 3) and a local VLM (Moondream 2) on the Raspberry Pi 5. Gemma 3 “listens” through Whisper and can respond through Piper TTS.

Brenpoly did his best to give the AI agent a vibe that matches BMO and it is pretty close. Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite nail the voice and so this BMO has a slightly British accent. But I’d certainly be willing to accept that quirk if I could have Brenpoly’s BMO on my desk.