Tiny, Hackable Telepresence Robot For Under $100? Meet Goby

April 17, 2025 by Donald Papp 10 Comments

[Charmed Labs] are responsible for bringing numerous open-source hardware products to fruition over the years, and their latest device is an adorably small robotic camera platform called Goby, currently crowdfunding for its initial release. Goby has a few really clever design features and delivers a capable (and hackable) platform for under 100 USD.

Goby embraces its small size, delivering what its creators dub “tinypresence” — or the feeling of being there, but on a very small scale. Cardboard courses, LEGO arenas, or even tabletop gaming scenery hits different when experienced from a first-person perspective. Goby is entirely reprogrammable with nothing more than a USB cable and the Arduino IDE, while costing less than most Arduino starter kits.

Recharging happens by driving over the charger, then pivoting down so the connectors (the little blunt vampire fangs under and to each side of the camera) come into contact with the charger.

One of the physical features we really like is the tail-like articulated caster at the rear. Flexing this pivots Goby up or down (and can even flip Goby completely over), allowing one to pan and tilt the view without needing to mount the camera on a gimbal. It also comes into play for recharging; Goby simply moves over the disc-shaped charger and pivots down to make contact.

At Goby‘s heart is an ESP32-S3 and OmniVision OV2640 camera sensor streaming a live video feed (and driving controls) with WebRTC. Fitting the WebRTC stack onto an ESP32 wasn’t easy, but opens up possibilities beyond just media streaming.

Goby is set up to make launching an encrypted connection as easy as sharing a URL or scanning a QR code. The link is negotiated between bot and client with the initial help of an external server, and once a peer-to-peer connection is established, the server’s job is done and it is out of the picture. [Charmed Labs]’s code for this functionality — named BitBang — is in beta and destined for an open release as well. While BitBang is being used here to make it effortless to access Goby remotely, it’s more broadly intended to make web access for any ESP32-based device easier to implement.

As far as tiny remote camera platforms go, it might not be as small as rebuilding a Hot Wheels car into a micro RC platform, but it’s definitely more accessible and probably cheaper, to boot. Check it out at the Kickstarter (see the first link in this post) and watch it in action in the video, embedded just below the page break.

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DIY AI Butler Is Simpler And More Useful Than Siri

April 15, 2025 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

[Geoffrey Litt] shows that getting an effective digital assistant that’s tailored to one’s own needs just needs a little DIY, and thanks to the kinds of tools that are available today, it doesn’t even have to be particularly complex. Meet Stevens, the AI assistant who provides the family with useful daily briefs. The back end? Little more than one SQLite table and a few cron jobs.

A sample of Stevens’ notebook entries, both events and things to simply remember.

Every day, Stevens sends a daily brief via Telegram that includes calendar events, appointments, weather notes, reminders, and even a fun fact for the day. Stevens isn’t just send-only, either. Users can add new entries or ask questions about items through Telegram.

It’s rudimentary, but [Geoffrey] already finds it far more useful than Siri. This is unsurprising, as it has been astutely observed that big tech’s digital assistants are designed to serve their makers rather than their users. Besides, it’s also fun to have the freedom to give an assistant its own personality, something existing offerings sorely lack.

Architecture-wise, the assistant has a notebook (the single SQLite table) that gets populated with entries. These entries come from things like reading family members’ Google calendars, pulling data from a public weather API, processing delivery notices from the post office, and Telegram conversations. With a notebook of such entries (along with a date the entry is expected to be relevant), generating a daily brief is simple. After all, LLMs (Large Language Models) are amazingly good at handling and formatting natural language. That’s something even a locally-installed LLM can do with ease.

[Geoffrey] says that even this simple architecture is super useful, and it’s not even a particularly complex system. He encourages anyone who’s interested to check out his project, and see for themselves how useful even a minimally-informed assistant can be when it’s designed with ones’ own needs in mind.

Software Project Pieces Broken Bits Back Together

April 13, 2025 by Donald Papp 18 Comments

With all the attention on LLMs (Large Language Models) and image generators lately, it’s nice to see some of the more niche and unusual applications of machine learning. GARF (Generalizeable 3D reAssembly for Real-world Fractures) is one such project.

GARF may play fast and loose with acronym formation, but it certainly knows how to be picky when it counts. Its whole job is to look at the pieces of a broken object and accurately figure out how to fit the pieces back together, even if there are some missing bits or the edges aren’t clean.

Re-assembling an object from imperfect fragments is a nontrivial undertaking.

Efficiently and accurately figuring out how to re-assemble different pieces into a whole is not a trivial task. One may think it can in theory be brute-forced, but the complexity of such a job rapidly becomes immense. That’s where machine learning methods come in, as researchers created a system that can do exactly that. It addresses the challenge of generalizing from a synthetic data set (in which computer-generated objects are broken and analyzed for training) and successfully applying it to the kinds of highly complex breakage patterns that are seen in real-world objects like bones, recovered archaeological artifacts, and more.

The system is essentially a highly adept 3D puzzle solver, but an entirely different beast from something like this jigsaw puzzle solving pick-and-place robot. Instead of working on flat pieces with clean, predictable edges it handles 3D scanned fragments with complex break patterns even if the edges are imperfect, or there are missing pieces.

GARF is exactly the kind of software framework that is worth keeping in the back of one’s mind just in case it comes in handy some day. The GitHub repository contains the code (although at this moment the custom dataset is not yet uploaded) but there is also a demo available for the curious.

The Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer (Brought To You By Vibes)

April 12, 2025 by Donald Papp 22 Comments

Incomplete JSON (such as from a log that terminates unexpectedly) doesn’t parse cleanly, which means anything that usually prints JSON nicely, won’t. Frustration with this is what led [Simon Willison] to make The Incomplete JSON pretty printer, a single-purpose web tool that pretty-prints JSON regardless of whether it’s complete or not.

Making a tool to solve a particular issue is a fantastic application of software, but in this case it also is a good lead-in to some thoughts [Simon] has to share about vibe coding. The incomplete JSON printer is a perfect example of vibe coding, being the product of [Simon] directing an LLM to iteratively create a tool and not looking at the actual code once.

Sometimes, however the machine decides to code something is *fine*.

[Simon] shares that the term “vibe coding” was first used in a social media post by [Andrej Karpathy], who we’ve seen shared a “hello world” of GPT-based LLMs as well as how to train one in pure C, both of which are the product of a deep understanding of the subject (and fantastically educational) so he certainly knows how things work.

Anyway, [Andrej] had a very specific idea he was describing with vibe coding: that of engaging with the tool in almost a state of flow for something like a weekend project, just focused on iterating one’s way to what they want without fussing the details. Why? Because doing so is new, engaging, and fun.

Since then, vibe coding as a term seems to get used to refer to any and all AI-assisted coding, a subject on which folks have quite a few thoughts (many of which were eagerly shared on a recent Ask Hackaday on the subject).

Of course human oversight is critical to a solid and reliable development workflow. But not all software is the same. In the case of the Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer, [Simon] really doesn’t care what the code actually looks like. He got it made in a short amount of time, the tool does exactly what he wants, and it’s hard to imagine the stakes being any lower. To [Simon], however the LMM decided to do things is fine, and there’s a place for that.

DIY Soldering Tweezers, Extra Thrifty

April 12, 2025 by Donald Papp 11 Comments

It started when [Mitxela] was faced with about a hundred incorrectly-placed 0603 parts. Given that he already owned two TS101 soldering irons, a 3D printer, and knows how to use FreeCAD (he had just finished designing a custom TS101 holder) it didn’t take long to create cost-effective DIY soldering tweezers.

Two screws allow adjusting the irons to ensure the tips line up perfectly.

The result works great! The TS101 irons are a friction-fit and the hinge (designed using the that-looks-about-right method) worked out just fine on the first try. Considering two TS101 irons are still cheaper than any soldering tweezer he could find, and one can simply undock the TS101s as needed, we call this a solid win.

One feature we really like is being able to precisely adjust the depth of each iron relative to each other, so that the tips can be made to line up perfectly. A small screw and nut at the bottom end of each holder takes care of that. It’s a small but very thoughtful design feature.

Want to give it a try? The FreeCAD design file (and .stl model) is available from [Mitxela]’s project page. Just head to the bottom to find the links.

We’ve seen DIY soldering tweezers using USB soldering irons from eBay but the TS101 has a form factor that seems like a particularly good fit.

Tiny Pogo Robot Gets Wings, Does Flips

April 12, 2025 by Donald Papp 8 Comments

Most robots depend on controlled environments, because the real world is hard to get around in. The smaller the robot, the bigger this problem because little wheels (or legs) can take only little steps. One way around that is MIT’s latest one-legged hopping robot, which sports a set of four insect-like wings on its top end and can quickly pogo-hop its way across different terrain with ease.

The four wings provide lift, and steer the robot so that its single leg lands precisely.

The wings aren’t for flying in the usual sense. They provide lift, but also help the tiny device steer itself so that its hops land precisely. Earlier incarnations of one-legged hopping robots (like this one) accomplished this with propellers and electric motors, but traditional motors are a non-starter on a device that weighs less than a paperclip.

Right now, this little winged hopper is not completely self-contained (power and control systems are off-board) but running it as a tethered unit allows researchers to test and evaluate different, minimalistic ways for a machine to move around efficiently. And efficiency is the whole goal of going in this direction.

Certainly tiny flying drones already exist and get about in the real world just fine. But if one wants to shed mass, ditch conventional motors, and reduce cost and power consumption, this tiny winged hopping machine is one way to do it. And it can even carry payloads! The payloads are tiny, of course, but being able to haul around ten times one’s own weight and still function reliably is an impressive feat.

You can watch it in action in the video embedded just below the page break. Once you’ve watched that, we’d like to remind you that novel locomotion isn’t just the domain of hopping robots. Tiny robots with explosive joints is just as wild as it sounds.

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Forget Propellers, Embrace Tentacle-based Locomotion

April 9, 2025 by Donald Papp 25 Comments

Underwater robots face many challenges, not least of which is how to move around. ZodiAq is a prototype underwater soft robot (link is to research paper) that takes an unusual approach to this problem: multiple flexible appendages. The result is a pretty unconventional-looking device that can not only get around effectively, but can do so without disturbing marine life.

ZodiAq sports a soft flexible appendage from each of its twelve faces, but they aren’t articulated like you might think. Despite this, the device can crawl and swim.

With movement inspired by bacterial flagella, ZodiAq moves in an unusual but highly controllable way.

Each soft appendage is connected to a motor, which rotates the attached appendage. This low-frequency but high-torque rotation, combined with the fact that each appendage has a 45° bend to it, has each acting as a rotor. Rotation of the appendages acts on the surrounding fluid, generating thrust. When used together in the right way, these appendages allow the unit to move in a perfectly controllable manner.

This locomotion method is directly inspired by the swimming gait of bacterial flagella, which the paper mentions are regarded as the only example of a biological “wheel”.

How fast can it go? The prototype covers a distance of two body lengths every fifteen seconds. True, it’s no speed demon compared to a propeller, but it doesn’t disturb marine life or environments as it moves around. This method of movement has a lot going for it. It’s adaptable and doesn’t use all twelve appendages at once; so there’s redundancy built in. If some get damaged or go missing, it can still move, just slower.

ZodiAq‘s design strikes us as a very accessible concept, should any aspiring marine robot hackers wish to give it a shot. We’ve seen other highly innovative and beautiful underwater designs as well, like body-length undulating fins and articulated soft arms.

We do notice that since it lacks a “front” — it might be a challenge to decide how to mount something like a camera. If you have any ideas, share them in the comments.