You can bring the safety and security provided by the minds of Aperture Laboratories into your home now thanks to maker and developer Reckless_commenter and his latest Raspberry Pi-powered creation. Using our favorite SBC, he’s brought to life the creepy sentry turret from the ‘Portal’ franchise—albeit a stationary one without bullets that’s still sure to strike fear in anyone familiar with the ominous security drones.
According to Reckless_commenter, the idea began simply as an opportunity to 3D print a unit for decoration. However, the 3D model didn’t quite print cleanly and required a bit of work to splice in a way that would produce better results. It was during this process that he quickly realized it would be possible to create room inside the turret for some microelectronics.
After a bit of deliberation, he landed on throwing in a Raspberry Pi along with an LED for the eye on the front and speaker so it could talk like the ones from the game. A battery makes the unit portable so you don’t need a power cable or power outlet nearby to power the unit.
To keep the hardware footprint small, Reckless_commenter opted to throw in a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. The Pi is connected to an LED along with an Adafruit MAX98357A amplifier module which interfaces with a small 3W speaker for audio output. For power, it’s using a LiPo battery and an Adafruit PowerBoost 1000C module. The sentry turret also has a charging port so you don’t have to take it apart to replace the battery. A simple power switch lets you turn the device on and off.
One of the hallmark traits of the Portal sentry turret is the eerie sound bites they spout when you’re detected. To pull this off, Reckless_commenter is using Pygame to play soundbites from the game. There’s plenty of opportunity to upgrade this project even further with motion sensors or even a camera module to use AI for person detection.
If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project in action, check out the full thread shared to Reddit by Reckless_commenter who included a video link as well as plenty of build details.