In one day, you may regret that you forgot to take the pills, or you did not read an email at the right time, or you just want to listen your favorite music without power on the tablet or the laptop. In all these cases and for a lot other many tasks exists smart solution: robotic assistants.

Noodle is a special project that can be built at home using cheap components and a 3D printer. It can take a wide variety of shapes, but for a shorter manufacturing time, you can check all these steps and download the files with the program and the 3D model for printing the body.

Powered by the fruit named single board computer, the open-source Noodle is a smart robot endowed with thoughts and feelings of a human. The Raspberry Pi computer can be programed to react on the changes from environments or to monitor the physical space.

The Noodle can be programmed to react when someone arrives, or to use the Raspberry Pi abilities to navigate on the Internet and check your home, or running advanced OpenCV applications to detect if someone is in the wrong place.

In this tutorial you may find the main sections after then you can start building at home the robotic assistant. Setting up the Raspberry Pi is the first section from where you will find how to plug-in the peripherals into the Pi, followed by the setup process of the software. The operating system that runs on Raspberry Pi is the Raspbian OS, which make a good team with Node.js platform able to build fast network applications.

In the second section you may find all the information how to connect all the electronics including here the speaker, the microphone, the Raspberry Pi camera, a TFT display, and how to power the entire system with a 10000mAh battery pack for Pi.

The creation of the enclosure is the final part of the tutorial. You’re free to use any material to build the body since all the components connected to the Pi are functioning without a body, but in this tutorial is explained how to use the plastic for building the body of the robot assistant.

List of materials

In digital form, you can create Noodle with almost any 3D modeling software. The project was started in Autodesk Pier 9 workshop space and takes over a month to design the multiple parts of the robot. In the following, I explore the main parts that you need to start the assistant project:

• Single board computer: Raspberry Pi Model B link;
• Camera: Raspberry Pi Camera link;
• SD card for Raspberry Pi: 8GB Card with NOOBS 1.3 link;
• USB cable: A/MicroB link;
• Speaker: USB Powered Speakers link;
• Pi Cobbler: Adafruit Assembled Pi Cobbler Breakout + Cable for Raspberry Pi link;
• WiFi Module: Miniature WiFi (802.11b/g/n) Module for Raspberry Pi link;
• Display: NTSC/PAL (Television) TFT Display with 2.0-inch Diagonal link;
• Battery: USB Battery Pack for Raspberry Pi – 10000mAh – 2 x 5V @ 2A link;
• Microphone: Blue Snowflake Microphone link;