AI Rocky from 'Project Hail Mary' - Raspberry Pi
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This Maker Monday, we’re sharing our favourite build from the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine — and we think readers of our blog might also be big fans of this sci-fi stalwart.
Project Hail Mary is a 2026 film based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir, who also wrote the book that The Martian is based on. Both films feature an everyman forced to rely on deep scientific knowledge to survive, and we’d highly recommend them. The star of Project Hail Mary is not, as the marketing materials would have you believe, Ryan Gosling — it’s a robot named Rocky. Leviathan Engineer had a go at building his own Rocky with a Raspberry Pi and a dose of AI.
The build uses a 4GB Raspberry Pi 5, a PCA9685 servo driver HAT, an internal microphone and speaker, and seven servos to make Rocky’s legs move (plus an additional power supply, because asking a Raspberry Pi to power seven servos is a bit much).
The maker installed Claude Code on the Raspberry Pi to take care of all the programming. This entails recognising speech, generating replies in the manner of Rocky from the film, and then using text-to-speech to make Rocky talk back to the user. Thanks to AI, the user can tell Rocky to do things that haven’t been preprogrammed: Leviathan Engineer shows an example of the machine responding to his request for a fist bump.
Creating the 3D-printed body proved challenging. Because the maker used multicoloured filament, the print required some adjustment in the slicer software; rather than being oriented for the most efficient print, the body and legs were arranged so that the filament would change colour in horizontal gradients.
Find more Raspberry Pi projects in Raspberry Pi Official Magazine
This article appeared in issue 167 of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, which you can access online. You can also subscribe to the print version of our magazine. Not only do we deliver worldwide, but those who sign up to the six- or twelve-month print subscription will receive a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W!
You can find Raspberry Pi Official Magazine on Facebook, X, Threads, LinkedIn, and Mastodon. You can also contact the team via email: [email protected]
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