A man’s hand is visible holding a large, potato-shaped object in the foreground. A short, white, cylindrical structure is on the top of the potato, with black wires bending back into the potato. A smaller rectangular structure is to one side of it, and a red alligator clip connects to a nail protruding from the potato.

Building A Potato-based GLaDOS As An Introduction To AI

July 6, 2025 by Aaron Beckendorf 5 Comments

Although not nearly as intimidating as her ceiling-mounted hanging arm body, GLaDOS spent a significant portion of the Portal 2 game in a stripped-down computer powered by a potato battery. [Dave] had already made a version of her original body, but it was built around a robotic arm that was too expensive for the project to be really accessible. For his latest project, therefore, he’s created a AI-powered version of GLaDOS’s potato-based incarnation, which also serves as a fun introduction to building AI systems.

[Dave] wanted the system to work offline, so he needed a computer powerful enough to run all of his software locally. He chose an Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano, which was powerful enough to run a workable software system, albeit slowly and with some memory limitations. A potato cell unfortunately doesn’t generate enough power to run a Jetson, and it would be difficult to find a potato large enough to fit the Jetson inside. Instead, [Dave] 3D-printed and painted a potato-shaped enclosure for the Jetson, a microphone, a speaker, and some supplemental electronics.

A large language model handles interactions with the user, but most models were too large to fit on the Jetson. [Dave] eventually selected Llama 3.2, and used LlamaIndex to preprocess information from the Portal wiki for retrieval-augmented generation. The model’s prompt was a bit difficult, but after contacting a prompt engineer, [Dave] managed to get it to respond to the hapless user in an appropriately acerbic manner. For speech generation, [Dave] used Piper after training it on audio files from the Portal wiki, and for speech recognition used Vosk (a good programming exercise, Vosk being, in his words, “somewhat documented”). He’s made all of the final code available on GitHub under the fitting name of PotatOS.

The end result is a handheld device that sarcastically insults anyone seeking its guidance. At least Dave had the good sense not to give this pernicious potato control over his home.

Open A Portal To An NES Emulator

June 13, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 2 Comments

The Portal games were revolutionary not only for their puzzle-based, narrative-driven gameplay, but also for their unique physics engine, which let players open portals anywhere and conserve momentum and direction through them. They’re widely regarded as some of the best video games ever made, but even beyond that they have some extra features that aren’t talked about as much. Namely, there are a number of level editors and mods that allow the in-game components to be used to build things like logic gates and computers, and this project goes even further by building a working NES emulator, all within Portal 2.

The main limitation here is that Portal 2 can only support a certain number of in-game objects without crashing, far lower than what would be needed to directly emulate NES hardware. The creator of the project, [PortalRunner], instead turned to Squirrel, the Portal 2 scripting language, and set about porting an existing NES emulator called smolnes to this scripting language. This is easier said than done, as everything in the code needs to be converted eight bits and then all of the pointers in smolnes need to be converted to use arrays, since Squirrel doesn’t support pointers at all. As can be easily imagined, this led to a number of bugs that needed to be sorted out before the game would run at all.

For those interested in code golfing, porting, or cross-compatibility, this project is a master class not only in the intricacies of the Portal 2 scripting language but in the way the NES behaves as well, not to mention the coding skill needed to recognize unique behaviors of the C language and the Squirrel scripting language. But eventually [PortalRunner] is able to get Super Mario Bros. running in Portal 2, albeit with low resolution and frame rate. Since we heard you like games within games, someone else put DOOM inside DOOM so you can DOOM while you DOOM.

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This Potato Virtual Assistant Is Fully Baked

April 15, 2025 by Seth Mabbott 10 Comments

There are a number of reasons you might want to build your own smart speaker virtual assistant. Usually, getting your weather forecast from a snarky, malicious AI potato isn’t one of them, unless you’re a huge Portal fan like [Binh Pham].

[Binh Pham] built the potato incarnation of GLaDOS from the Portal 2 video game with the help of a ReSpeaker Light kit, an ESP32-based board designed for speech recognition and voice control, and as an interface for home assistant running on a Raspberry Pi.

He resisted the temptation to use a real potato as an enclosure and wisely opted instead to print one from a 3D file he found on Thingiverse of the original GLaDOS potato. Providing the assistant with the iconic synthetic voice of GLaDOS was a matter of repackaging an existing voice model for use with Home Assistant.

Of course all of this attention to detail would be for naught if you had to refer to the assistant as “Google” or “Alexa” to get its attention. A bit of custom modelling and on-device wake word detection, and the cyborg tuber was ready to switch lights on and off with it’s signature sinister wit.

We’ve seen a number of projects that brought Portal objects to life for fans of the franchise to enjoy, even an assistant based on another version of the GLaDOS the character. This one adds a dimension of absurdity to the collection.

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One Coder Is Porting Portal To The Nintendo 64

May 18, 2022 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

When Portal came out in 2007, developers Valve chose not to release the groundbreaking title on an obsolete Nintendo console long out of production. Nobody cared at the time, of course, but [James Lambert] is here to right that wrong. Yes, he’s porting Portal to the N64.

The port, or “demake,” as [James] calls it, has been under construction for some time. The project has posed some challenges: Portal was developed for PCs that were vastly more powerful than the Nintendo 64 of 1996. Thus, initial concerns were that the console wouldn’t be able to handle the physics of the game or render the recursive portal graphics.

However, hard work has paid off. [James] has chipped away, bit by bit, making improvements to his engine all the while. The latest work has the portals rendering nicely, and the companion cube works just the way you’d expect. There’s also a visible portal gun, and the engine can even render 15 recursive layers when looking through mirrored portals. Sixteen was too much.

Of course, there’s still lots to do. There’s no player model yet, and basic animations and sound are lacking. However, the core concept is there, and watching [James] flit through the not-quite-round portals is an absolute delight. Even better, it runs smoothly even on original Nintendo hardware. It’s a feat worthy of commendation.

We had no idea what [James] had in store back when we featured his work creating real-time shadows on N64 hardware. Now we know! Video after the break.

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3D Printed Portal Turret Moves And Talks Like The Real Thing

March 27, 2022 by Robin Kearey 19 Comments

Thanks to its innovative gameplay and quirky humor, Portal became an instant hit when it was released in 2007. Characters became cultural icons, quotes became memes and the game became a classic along with its 2011 sequel. Even today, more than a decade later, we regularly see hackers applying their skills in recreating some of the game’s elements. One beautiful example is [Joran de Raaff]’s physical rendition of a Portal Turret.

A 3D CAD drawing of a Portal Turret — Inside the Turret it’s full of moving parts.

[Joran] decided to use his 3D printer to create a Turret that can move and speak exactly as it does in the game. The result, as you can see in the video embedded below, was a triumph. We’re making a note here, “huge success”. The outer shell is a beautiful shiny white, an effect achieved through patient sanding, priming, and spraying with high-gloss paint. The internals are even more impressive with servos, microswitches, and a whole array of 3D-printed gears, cams, and levers.

A motion sensor activates the Turret whenever a human moves nearby. It will then open its wings and fire its guns while playing the corresponding sounds from the game. Its brains are formed by a Wemos D1 which drives the various LEDs and servos, while an MP3 player board holds a library of sound bites and plays them through a speaker hidden inside the Turret’s shell.

After posting his creation on YouTube [Joran] got many requests for the 3D files, so he made them available and wrote a comprehensive build guide. This should enable anyone with a 3D printer to build this neat gun, without getting too much science done. If this model is too small for you, then perhaps this life-sized model is more to your liking. If you prefer your Turret small and cute, check out this plushie version.

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GLaDOS Voice Assistant Passive-Aggressively Automates Home

September 13, 2021 by Ryan Flowers 7 Comments

With modern voice assistants we can tell a computer to play our favorite music, check the weather, or turn on a light. Like many of us, [nerdaxic] gave in to the convenience and perceived simplicity of various home automation products made by Google and Amazon. Also like many of us, he found it a bit difficult to accept the privacy implications that surround such cloud connected devices. But after selling his Home and Echo, [nerdaxic] missed the ability to control his smart home by voice command. Instead of giving in and buying back into the closed ecosystems he’d left behind, [nerdaxic] decided to open his home to a murderous, passive aggressive, sarcastic, slightly insane AI: GLaDOS, which you can see in action after the break.

Using open source designs from fellow YouTube creator [Mr. Volt], [nerdaxic] 3d printed as much of the GLaDOS animatronic model as he was able to, and implemented much of the same hardware to make it work. [nerdaxic] put more Open Source Software to use and has created a functional but somewhat limited home AI that can manage his home automation, give the weather, and tell jokes among other things. GLaDOS doesn’t fail to deliver some great one liners inspired by the original Portal games while heeding [nerdaxic]’s commands, either.

A ReSpeaker from Seeed Studio cleans up the audio sent to a Raspberry Pi 4, and allows for future expansion that will allow GLaDOS to look in the direction of the person speaking to it. With its IR capable camera, another enhancement will allow GlaDOS to stare at people as they walk around. That’s not creepy at all, right? [nerdaxic] also plans to bring speech-to-text processing in-house instead of the Google Cloud Speech-To-Text API used in its current iteration, and he’s made everything available on GitHub so that you too can have a villainous AI hanging on your every word.

Of course if having GLaDOS looming isn’t enough, you could always build a functional life size Portal turret or listen to the radio on your very own Portal Radio.

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Animatronic Puppetry Controller Skips Joystick Or Keyboard

September 4, 2021 by Danie Conradie 2 Comments

One of the major challenges of animatronics is creating natural looking motion. You can build something with an actuator for every possible degree of freedom, but it will still be disappointing if you are unable to control it to smoothly play the part. [Mr. Volt] has developed a passion for animatronic projects, but found programming them tedious, and manual control with keyboard or controller difficult to do right. As an alternative, he is building Waldo, an electronic puppetry controller.

The Waldo rig is being developed in conjunction with [Mr. Volt]’s build of Wheatley, the talkative ball-shaped robot from the Portal 2 game. The puppetry rig consists of a series of rings for [Mr Volt]’s hand, with the position of each being read by angle sensors. This allows him to control Wheatley’s orientation of the body and eyeball, eyelids, and handles. Wheatley and Waldo both still need a few refinements, but we look forward to seeing the finished project in action.

The Portal games have inspired several featured projects, including GLaDOS, the turrets, and of course more Wheatly builds.

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