Amazon Alexa Device Smart Robot Thomas Burns
Inventor Thomas Burns, better known as Workshop Nation online, turned an Amazon Alexa device into a smart robot, complete with blinking eyes. Why? The Amazon Echo just seemed too robotic and lacked personality, so he decided to give it new life by adding a pair of animatronic eyes as well as a waveform mouth made from an old CRT television.



Clear acrylic sheets with a design made in Fusion360 were used for the robot’s chassis, while a person sensor is used for face tracking. The Amazon Echo device was initially going to be placed outside the chassis, but in the end, it fit snugly within all of the other hardware components. An Arduino mega board is connected to the servo boards to keep all of the animatronics working properly.


Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) | HD smart display with motion and Alexa | Charcoal


Echo Show 10 (3rd Gen) | HD smart display with motion and Alexa | Charcoal

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Amazon Alexa Device Smart Robot Thomas Burns

What an amazing project. I gotta admit I was imagining you’d incorporate ChatGPT somehow, but nevertheless the echo seems to be a good fit. I think using a [Raspberry] Pi with some voice recognition to input into some of those new AI voice models would make it eerily life like,” said one fan.