Imagine if you could phone a Dalek and tell him what to do…

Making that dream a reality was mine and Peter’s ManMetHacks 2.0 hack: Barry the Dalek! In an attempt to grab the Twilio prize at the hackathon, we made an SMS interface to this toy Dalek.

Barry has a phone number, and you can text him commands. gf, for example, will instruct him to go forwards. gb will go backward, and tl and tr will turn around. s something will have him speak the words “something” out of a super janky speaker and amp setup. It kind of sounds like a real Dalek!

Barry started out as a generic toy Dalek, but we hacked him apart, pulled out his internals, and replaced them with a Pi. Needless to say, we ran into some issues here, and you can read much more about these on our Devpost page if you’re interested.