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dchuk 8 hours ago [-]
This is awesome thank you for building this! I’ve wanted to try building some sort of companion robot for my kids to play with, that leverages edge voice AI models and likely an api connection to one of the big SOTA providers for the brain, with a custom system prompt to have a very simple child-like personality. I feel like it would be neat to use an android phone as the “face” where you get a nice screen to render on, compute for the edge models, and the forward and rear facing cams for the vision all included. One of those daydream projects…
xanderjanz 8 hours ago [-]
Thanks!
- Checkout Reachy Mini or Stack-chan on orobotio, those are the top 2 SOTA AI personality robots, what you're looking for! Not an exact match, but I see the vision, it's definitely buildable.
- What AI services are you most familiar with? Claude? GPT? OpenRouter? HuggingFace? Gemini? Something else? I'm planning to support all of them, but will be helpful to know which would help you most.
- What would you estimate your skill level with programming, 3d printing, and building robotics electronics? beginner - moderate - expert?
Hi thanks for the question! HN flagged your comment, so I'll respond here.
You said: "I tried building a hexapod last year and the hardest part wasn't the printing, it was figuring out which servo library worked with which controller board. The Github repos were all over the place with dependencies. Does orobot normalize the BOM and software stack info, or is it mainly aggregating the STLs? I'm curious if the agent-generated content catches stuff like "this uses a deprecated ROS package" or incompatible firmware versions."
1) Yep it normalizes BOMs, whether it's on personal blogs, google docs, github, markdown, html, wherever. Agreed they are all over the place and hard to navigate, but LLM agents are really good at this. As much as it can, it tries to build a single one-click Amazon add to cart with everything in it. If parts aren't on Amazon, it prefers Alibaba next, or they're linked separately. Because some projects online are forks and only have BOM lists for their additions, so you need parts from the fork and the original BOM list, orobot puts both in one spot.
2) Yes orobot writes on-device javascript commands to git pull and run Makefiles or do whatever else it has to do to bootstrap. And that's installed over wifi through the app.
3) Yes the Agent install code definitely should fixup deprecated ROS libraries. Either internally to orobot.io, and it even will post push requests upstream, if there are bugs buried in the source GitHub project. Weather or not it has I'm not sure. Some of this is really new.
I don't want to promise anything I haven't tried myself. Can you link which hexapod github projects you were trying and if they're on orobotio already and what controller board and servos you have? I can try to look up for you how well supported it is right now.
- Checkout Reachy Mini or Stack-chan on orobotio, those are the top 2 SOTA AI personality robots, what you're looking for! Not an exact match, but I see the vision, it's definitely buildable.
- What AI services are you most familiar with? Claude? GPT? OpenRouter? HuggingFace? Gemini? Something else? I'm planning to support all of them, but will be helpful to know which would help you most.
- What would you estimate your skill level with programming, 3d printing, and building robotics electronics? beginner - moderate - expert?
Join my discord, and I'd love to set up a call with you. https://discord.gg/DWfUsCNVs
Thanks for checking it out!
Hi thanks for the question! HN flagged your comment, so I'll respond here.
You said: "I tried building a hexapod last year and the hardest part wasn't the printing, it was figuring out which servo library worked with which controller board. The Github repos were all over the place with dependencies. Does orobot normalize the BOM and software stack info, or is it mainly aggregating the STLs? I'm curious if the agent-generated content catches stuff like "this uses a deprecated ROS package" or incompatible firmware versions."
1) Yep it normalizes BOMs, whether it's on personal blogs, google docs, github, markdown, html, wherever. Agreed they are all over the place and hard to navigate, but LLM agents are really good at this. As much as it can, it tries to build a single one-click Amazon add to cart with everything in it. If parts aren't on Amazon, it prefers Alibaba next, or they're linked separately. Because some projects online are forks and only have BOM lists for their additions, so you need parts from the fork and the original BOM list, orobot puts both in one spot.
2) Yes orobot writes on-device javascript commands to git pull and run Makefiles or do whatever else it has to do to bootstrap. And that's installed over wifi through the app.
3) Yes the Agent install code definitely should fixup deprecated ROS libraries. Either internally to orobot.io, and it even will post push requests upstream, if there are bugs buried in the source GitHub project. Weather or not it has I'm not sure. Some of this is really new.
I don't want to promise anything I haven't tried myself. Can you link which hexapod github projects you were trying and if they're on orobotio already and what controller board and servos you have? I can try to look up for you how well supported it is right now.
Thanks for the feedback!