I built a robot to cheat at Pokémon!!

Sophie Déziel

Rails dev @ Acquisio

Twitch Streamer

@sophiedeziel

Guiz de Pessemier

Co-founder of Outerminds

Youtuber

Twitch Streamer

@jeuserieux

Automation to the rescue!!

Two challenges

• Controlling the game
   
• Have input to make decisions

Servo-motors

• Cheap
   
• Easy to find
   
• You can position the arm precisely
   
• Easy to control
   
• Does not require to destroy a controller
   
• Slow

Webcam

• Easy to position close to the screen
   
• Lots of Open-Source Software to control them
   
• Plug and Play (most of the time)
   
• We can use a single pixel to make a decision

We can go forward

Make it autonomous and easy to share with Raspberry Pi

We need to make it:

• Reliable
• Precise
• Configurable

Make it reliable

• Unsupervised
   
• Perfect timing
   
• Must not move

Arduino

"Computer vision"

• Easy to setup
   
• Not so hard to code

Having an interface

• Control remotely
   
• Edit settings easily
   
• Visualise the webcam

Putting it all together

The working prototype!

Ooops!

Unplanned features

• Controls improvements
   
• Easy updates
   
• Two people working on the same robot
   
• Communication features (SMS and Tweets)

And now?

Want to build it?

So cool!

github.com/sophiedeziel/robo-catcher

You can modify it:

• Add Lights and lasers
   
• Remove the Arduino and use the RP GPIO
   
• Improve the interface
   
• Adapt the codebase for another game

OS Hardware

• Raspberry Pi
   
• Arduino

OSS

• Raspbian
• Motion
• Firmata
• Ruby
• Rails
• RMagick
• Nginx

Thank you so much

Question?