DIY Disembodied Droid Dome Is a Delightful Desktop Distraction

Forgive me for that title — writers can’t resist alliteration. But it does describe this project, which is a sort of Macintosh-styled robotic head that sits on a desk and displays various facial expressions. Redditor illicitpugs created this droid head as homage to Stray, but it is charming enough to make even non-gamers smile.

Stray is a recent video game in which players embody a cat lost in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. Humanity is gone, but robots still inhabit the world. The player, acting through the cat, must interact with those robots to progress through the story. Thanks to the developer’s fantastic art style choices, those robots (or “droids”) combine retro clunkiness with anthropomorphic relatability. In short, they look cool and friendly.

While playing Stray, illicitpugs noticed that the droid’s heads bore a striking resemblance to old Macintosh computers (which probably isn’t a coincidence). That inspired them to model their own droid head in Autodesk Fusion 360 to match their Macintosh Classic II computer. After finishing he 3D CAD modeling, they 3D-printed the parts to build the droid head.

Animations playing on the screen bring the head to life. Those come from the faces of the droid characters in the actual game. A dial on the “chin” lets illicitpugs switch between different faces and pushing the dial swaps color schemes.

The face animation interface is a Node.js app that runs in kiosk mode on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+. The screen is a Pimoroni HyperPixel 4.0 Square IPS LCD with a resolution of 720x720. The dial knob attaches to an Adafruit I2C rotary encoder board.

For now, this device’s only purpose is decoration. But illicitpugs plans to add an interface that shows 3D printer status information via the OctoPrint API, which would give the device some utility. Even without that utility, we would call this project a resounding success.