[Alan Reiner] is building a sloth-like door greeter for his house. Sloxel, as he is affectionately known, can move around and even talk, with [Alan] using some nifty tricks in the design process
Sloxel’s job is to vet visitors to [Alan’s] house, before inviting them to knock on the door or to leave their details and go away. There’s still plenty of work to do on that functionality, which [Alan] plans to implement using ChatGPT. In the meantime, though, he’s been working hard on the hardware platform that will power Sloxel. A Raspberry Pi 3B+ is charged with running the show, including talking to the ChatGPT API and handling Sloxel’s motion along a linear rail with a number of stepper motors.
What we really love about this build, though, is the enclosure. [Alan] designed a housing for everything that can be 3D printed as a single part with print-in-place hinges. The four sides of the enclosure can then be folded up and into place with a minimum of fuss. Plus, the enclosure has plenty of nifty features that makes it easy to mount all the required hardware. It’s a neat design that we’d love to repurpose for some of our own projects.
We’ve seen other neat ideas in this area before, like using PCBs themselves as an enclosure. Video after the break.
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