Having an AI assistant is all the rage these days, but AI assistants usually don’t know about your automation setups and may have difficulty dealing with tasks asynchronously. Enter zclaw. It gives you the option to have a personal assistant on an ESP32 backed by Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter. The whole thing fits in 888KB, and while it doesn’t host the LLM, it does add key capabilities to monitor and control devices connected to the ESP32.
You communicate with the assistant via telegram. You can say things like “Remember the garage sensor is on GPIO 4.” Then later you might say: “In 20 minutes, check the garage sensor and if it is high, set GPIO 5 low.” It has an RTOS for scheduling tasks and is aware of the timezone and common periods. Memory persists across reboots, and you can pick different personas.
Some of the use cases mentioned in the manual show how having something that can precisely schedule, control, or monitor devices might pay off. Ideas like bringing up a lab setup, scheduling plant watering, and more would be difficult to do with just a stock chatbot.
The AI can also introspect. For example, you could create a few tasks on a schedule and then ask the device to “show me my schedules.” You can also create up to 8 tools with a name, description, and action. This lets you describe something like “power_down_bench” and then tell zclaw to execute it on demand or even on a schedule. Overall, an interesting and well-documented setup.
We’ve seen many projects like this, and each has its own charm. And its own personality.
I swear to the spaghetti monster someone’s gotta be astroturfing these dang claws. The hype feels so fake.
You pay the cloud so many tokens to do things this way.
Cool to demonstrate how tiny the client side is though. I’ll grant that a tiny RTOS with configuration and scripting controlled by an LLM is pretty neat.
Most of this just seems like something you’d implement on a PLC with ladder-logic and remote management.
So where and why is there an angle to cram in the most inefficient way of processing commands into the mix?
No, seriously, this article makes zero sense.
Slow news day…. oh look they mention esp32… send it!
SEO… That currently being used by every backdoor campaign in existence poorly coded agentic AI proxy service is on all the news cycles and the cattle go to low-brow marketing slop like moths into a UV light.. I think it was on some podcast which really riles the simple satiate hordes
in b4 automated wiping?
I mean yeah if you knew how to program a PLC then you’d do that, but this approach uses natural human language. Obviously not for serious stuff (yet) but it’s interesting.
“on an esp32”
… no? it’s connecting to something remotely. this is no more impressive — actually, arguably less impressive — than running meshtastic on an esp32 or something.