The Watcher Page

November 20, 2024

When I read about a little module called a "Person Sensor" that uses AI to identify people's faces I knew I had to build something with it. I decided to couple the Person Sensor with the Uncanny Eyes code to create what I call the Watcher. To make this project slightly disturbing, I built the project into the form of a face itself. So there is a face that is watching faces it sees. Weird right.

	The Watcher consists of two round LCDs for the eyes, a Person Sensor for the nose, A square LCD in the mouth and a couple of push button switches. Internally, a ESP32 runs the show. The displays are controlled via SPI and the Person Sensor is controlled via i2c. You can see a faint green light around the nose that is an indication that the Person Sensor has detected and/or identified a face. The Watcher has two mode of operation. First, if the blue push button is held down when power is applied, the Watcher just watches and tracks the face it sees. As you move your face around the Watcher's eyes will follow to keep its eyes on you. If the push button is not held down while power is applied the Watcher will not only track the face it sees, it will attempt to remember it. In this mode the Watcher will ask who we have here and bring up an onscreen keyboard (in the mouth) where a name can be specified for the face. Once the face is recognized the Watcher will remember the face until power is removed. A future software upgrade, if I ever get around to it, will be to save the face data to the Person Sensor module itself and to the SPIFFS file system so the face will always be remembered. Once a face is remembered whenever the Watcher sees the face again it will respond with the name associated with the face.
	Side view of the laser cut enclosure. Check out the intense green bloodshot eyes which are hard to see in the previous image.
	Rear view of the Watcher's laser cut enclosure. It is made from 3mm Baltic Birch.

Questions and comments to me Craig at: calhjh@gmail.com