Giant Raspberry Pi Nose Sniffs Objects, Sneezes Out a Printed Report

The nose knows and it lets you know through a thermal printout.

If there's one thing we’re experienced at here at Tom's Hardware, it's sniffing out a good Raspberry Pi project but this one nearly beat us to the punch! Maker, developer and artist Ardan Aga's latest project is using our favorite SBC inside of his giant nose sculpture. This interactive art display is able to "sniff" objects before printing out a thorough description of the object's odor poetically.

To interact with the nose, users must place an object underneath the nostrils. The Raspberry Pi is activated and identifies the object using a camera module. So it's not exactly smelling objects but rather detecting them using image recognition. Once the object has been identified, a receipt printer prints the description of the expected smell and provides the printout from one of the nostrils.

The image description process is handled using GPT-4. It processes details about the object's smells and compiles the description in a poetic manner so the user receives something more exciting to read about the odor. There is also a speaker included that takes the smelly poem and reads it aloud using text-to-speech.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation was able to get an exclusive scoop on the hardware used inside the nose. It's powered by a Raspberry Pi 4 that's connected to a camera module with a fisheye lens. The Pi is also connected to a thermal receipt printer as well as a distance sensor to know when an object has been placed underneath.

Software-wise, the nose relies on one of the most popular languages of choice—Python. A simple script is used to listen to data from the distance sensor so it knows when to parse images through its image recognition sequence. This then triggers the GPT-4 process to devise a lovely poem describing the smell.

The nose sculpture was put on display at the Olfactory Art Keller gallery in New York. If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project, check out the demo video shared to YouTube so you can see it in action and be sure to follow Ardan Aga for more cool creations in the future.

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Ash Hill is a Freelance News and Features Writer at Tom's Hardware US. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting.

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