Most people remember Interstellar as that visually stunning film with the nearly incomprehensible time-bending plot. But the real star of the movie was TARS, which was one of the most interesting robot designs we’ve seen on the silver screen. A real-life TARS would be quite the engineering nightmare, as the weight alone would be downright dangerous. But you can get all of that blocky charm at a smaller scale by following Makestreme’s guide to build an AI-powered desktop TARS that reads humorous weather reports.
This project relies on one of the genuinely cool aspects of modern LLM (large language model) AIs: their ability to mimic a desired “personality.” If you’ve never experienced that, you can try it for yourself right now for free. Just head over to OpenAI’s website and give ChatGPT a prompt like “describe a mall like you’re a valley girl.” It will oblige, as if you’re reading a monologue from Alicia Silverstone in Clueless.
In this case, Makestreme used Google’s Gemini AI to read weather reports retrieved from OpenWeather. Makestreme added the weather report information to the following prompt:
You’re a humorous AI robot. Describe this weather in a hilarious way. Your answer should be between 50 and 60 characters. Respond with only the humorous sentence and nothing else: {weather_data}
Gemini then returns the weather report, rewritten in the requested style. The desktop TARS displays that on it screen, so the user can get valuable information and a nice little chuckle when they glance at the robot.
That screen is a 0.96” OLED connected to an Espressif Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266 development board. Makestreme programmed it through the Arduino IDE to connect to WiFi and interface with the OpenWeather and Google Gemini APIs.
The final step is building a body for the desktop TARS and there is a lot of room for creativity there. Makestreme constructed that body from paper with printed graphics, cut and folded into the 3D shape. But it would be possible to make the body using several other methods, such as 3D printing.
Even if you don’t care about Interstellar and have no love for TARS (you monster, everyone loves TARS), Makestreme’s project does a great job of demonstrating how easy it is to work with an LLM AI to make a virtual assistant with whatever personality you want.
