Gus 2.0 Is an Adorable Desktop Robot That Monitors the Conditions of a Room

Do you ever feel like the room you’re sitting in just isn’t comfortable, but you can’t quite figure out why? Maybe your throat has a mysterious scratchiness or you’re sweating more than normal. It sure would be nice if there was some way to figure out what environmental conditions are causing your discomfort. Enter Gus 2.0, an adorable little desktop “robot” built by Makestreme to monitor several environmental data points.

Gus 2.0 isn’t actually a robot — it just looks like one and the design is very cute, like the kind of robot you might see in an animated Pixar flick. The face is a display with two big eyes and those provide an indication of the conditions in the room. If the eyes are big and full, everything is good, with each monitored parameter falling within the desired range. But if the eyes start drooping, that means something in the room is wrong. Maybe the temperature is too cold or the air quality is subpar. If the user desires specifics, they can touch the top of Gus 2.0’s head to see the real-time sensor readings.

Makestreme designed Gus 2.0 to monitor three different parameters: temperature, humidity, and air quality. Those first two are straightforward enough, but the term “air quality” on its own can mean a lot of different things. In this case, the sensor detects concentrations of potentially hazardous or toxic gases, including carbon monoxide, alcohol, formaldehyde, and others.

That air quality sensor and all of the other electronic components came from Seeed Studio. Gus 2.0’s brain is a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-C3 development board. The temperature and humidity module, part of Seeed Studio’s Grove line, contains a DHT22 sensor. The Air Quality Sensor v1.3 also has a Grove connector, as does the Touch Sensor.

The Grove connectors made wiring easy, though Makestreme did still do some soldering to connect the modules to the XIAO dev board.

Those components all fit into the 3D-printed enclosure that Makestreme designed in Autodesk Fusion 360. This was Makestreme’s first attempt at creating a CAD model specifically for 3D printing and there was a mistake that required some trimming, but the enclosure still looks nice.

Finally, Makestreme programmed Gus 2.0 using the Arduino IDE. That programming included a function to rate “comfort level” on a scale from 0 to 4, which ultimately controls the droopiness of the displayed eyes.