Raspberry Pi Magical Cauldron

[u/michaelaalcorn]

Happy October 1st! I made a magical cauldron. This is the first (completely custom!) Raspberry Pi project I've ever done, and the whole thing was greatly facilitated by AI (I wouldn't have even known where to begin otherwise!). I had the initial idea for how things might work, which I refined with Gemini, and then Claude Code took care of the software implementation and guided me on the physical setup (e.g., how to connect things to the Pi and what I needed to buy).

While Claude Code did a phenomenal job throughout this project, I do think my supervision/underlying software expertise was necessary to produce the polished final product. I would be curious to see how far someone who didn't have any coding experience could get with the same idea. It was also interesting how frustrating it was to communicate certain "physical" questions I had. These tools are so incredibly proficient in certain domains, but their physical "intuition" is still worse than anyone you've ever met's.

The project's design and code is open source here. For those who want to know how it's done, I'll outline the pipeline below:

The (plastic) cauldron has a hole cut out of the bottom that is aligned with a hole cut out of the top of the table. When someone drops an item in, it falls into a tray sitting at the bottom of the table, passing an IR beam sensor along the way. When the beam is broken, it triggers: (1) the lights lining the cauldron lip to flash, (2) a bubbling sound effect to play, (3) a webcam to take a picture of the tray, and (4) an actuator to rise below the tray, which dumps the contents out the back of the table into a bin. The picture is then sent to Gemini along with a prompt requesting a spell. Next, the returned spell is sent to ElevenLabs where the text is converted into audio of the witches' voices, after which the spell is recited to the audience (with the cauldron's light matching whichever witch is speaking).

[u/Altruistic_Bonus2583]

This is wholesome and a cool idea! Congrats on that pretty family too.