Gotta Catch 'Em All

Those that grew up loving the Pokémon universe (and those that still do!) are familiar with the Pokédex. These high-tech, portable electronic encyclopedias serve as guides to all things Pokémon. Any imaginable fact about Pokémon can be retrieved by these devices. However, the Pokédex is, of course, only fictional.

But that is no longer entirely true. Pokémon fans have grown up, and some of them have developed the skills to create their own real version of a Pokédex. BigRig Creates is not the first to do so, but he claims to have created the world’s greatest Pokédex. That is a big claim, but it might be true. Unlike most DIY Pokédex creations, BigRig Creates’ device is fully functional; every screen, button, and light actually works. Nothing is just for show.

Packed inside the Pokédex’s 3D-printed shell is an ESP32 development board and a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller. A camera was included to “catch” Pokémon by taking pictures of them. The primary display shows a picture, along with detailed information about the captured Pokémon. Three additional displays are used to show a text description and the type of the Pokémon.

The Pokédex was designed to recognize everything, from cards to stuffed animals, digital sprites, and fan art. Image recognition doesn’t work as you might expect. Rather than using an AI model, BigRig Creates instead runs a Google reverse image search. The results are scanned for the most common words to identify the Pokémon that is present.

To get the Pokédex’s voice right, Piper TTS was first experimented with. Using some post-processing techniques to make the synthetic voice more robotic worked pretty well, but was not perfect. To get everything just right (and live up to the “world’s greatest” claim), a custom text-to-speech model was trained to generate the device’s final voice.

To see a real-life Pokédex in action, be sure to check out BigRig Creates’ video below.