Modder builds Portal tribute in the form of potato GLaDOS to control his home
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A fan of Portal has created a tribute to the games with a unique smart home assistant that has been carefully crafted to resemble an iconic part of Portal 2.
Those who have played Portal 2 will recall the amusing part where hostile computer GLaDOS is removed from her usual environment and instead placed inside a humble potato. One fan took inspiration from this and decided to construct his own ‘PotatOS' to control his smart home.
The modder has even posted a guide to creating the smart home potato
Modder Pham Binh posted a full guide to the process on Hackster.io, along with a video. Surprisingly, the entire build costs less than $50, which makes it accessible to almost anyone who has Home Assistant running.
The physical build involved a ReSpeaker Lite kit from Seeed Studio, a Type-C USB cable, some screws, painting supplies and a 3D printed replica potato. Binh joked that he considered using an actual potato, but decided it would be impractical. The Potato GLaDOS model was found on Thingiverse and was modified to accommodate the required hardware.
Though there are several options for setting up the potato GLaDOS to control a smart home, Binh recommends Home Assistant, an open-source smart home hub. Using this, plus some add-ons, it is possible to connect the speaker to work with the smart home hub and become a voice assistant similar to Alexa or Google Home devices.
After that, the device needs to be configured to sound and act like GlaDOS. This can be done natively in Home Assistant using the GLaDOS voice in the ‘American Language' category. Then, a custom AI prompt is set in the Conversational Agent to ensure the potato GLaDOS has the correct sarcastic and subtly menacing personality.
The result is a potato-shaped device that can control your smart home and fulfil every function of a voice assistant. Just make sure it isn't connected to any neurotoxins.
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