Dave Burrell's ESP-Eyes Upgrade Gives Blinky the Telepresence Robot a Lot of Personality
Powered by an ESP32 — hence the name — Burrell's dual-display eyeball upgrade is perfect for Halloween.
Developer Dave Burrell's telepresence, Blinky, can finally live up to its name — thanks to a pair of ESP32-powered eyeballs, rendered to 1.3" displays.
"Halloween eyes with handheld Bluetooth controller using an ESP32," Burrell writes of his creation, dubbed ESP-Eyes. "Combined [James R. Behrens'] Bluetooth controller example with some example effects and some home-made eyeballs."
Built around an Espressif ESP32 development board, Blinky's eyeball upgrade uses an off-the-shelf Bluetooth remote control to send signals to the code which generates the eyeballs. Everything is mounted to a StereoPi stereoscopic camera system which forms Blinky's actual, functional "eyeballs" for stereo vision.
"After connecting to Bluetooth, I press two buttons to begin," Burrell explains of the device's operation, "then another to wake it from the black starry sleep and move the eyeballs around, carefully trying not anger it."
The source code for the project has been published to GitHub under an unspecified license.