Ever wanted a pathalogically conflicted artifical intelligence for your own home? Why, of course you do! Adafruit’s CRICKIT board has you covered (along with instructions for how to program it via Mu).

The Crickit (Creative Robotics and Interactive Construction Kit) is a an add-on for the Circuit Playground Express board. Cricket aims to make it easy to make friendly robots and thus make friends with robots (now there’s a sentiment we can all get behind). Essentially, Crickit complements and amplifies the CPX board by making it extraordinarily easy to interact with robotic “bits and bobs”.

What I love about this project is how simple it is to make and program. Once complete, just press the glowing red button to hear audio clips of HAL. The source code is less than 50 lines of Python and, perhaps most importantly, you have a chance to replace the recordings so your HAL is no longer an uncooperative controller of on-board systems, but perhaps a friendly computer in the spirit of Cricket. What’s more, this project is relatively easy to modify to other concepts such as responsive cuddly toys or the world’s most friendly door bell (remember those doors from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?).

Happy hacking!