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