Creative Raspberry Pi project: 3D-printed gorilla recites Shakespeare on a pedestal

"Let’s say you’re trying to teach a monkey how to recite Shakespeare while on a pedestal." This more or less famous metaphor stands at the beginning of an official blog post by X Development, a company founded by search giant Google in 2010 for research purposes. In short, it discusses how to approach such an imaginary project, and it particularly points out that a company should focus on its main product, which in this case would be the monkey, and not the pedestal.

However, a creative tinkerer has now taken this quote quite literally. He produced a miniature gorilla on a pedestal with his 3D printer, and subsequently taught him how to recite the famous English author with the help of a Raspberry Pi. Therefore he utilized a fairly uncommon 1.28-inch round LCD display with a resolution of 240x240 pixels, which is basically used as the gorilla's head. He added a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ (from US$69 on Amazon) and a speaker, both of which were integrated in the aforementioned pedestal.

Because the creator of the project intended to use an older version of the Raspbian OS, he decided not to use the newer Raspberry Pi 4 in order to avoid potential compatibility issues. After numerous software adjustments which were needed to operate the unusual round display, this peculiar Raspberry Pi project was apparently completed successfully. When playing an according video, the miniature gorilla is indeed able to recite Shakespeare while sitting on his pedestal. The technical details and a complete guide to this creative project was released on Instructables and featured in an article at Tom's Hardware.