Show HN: I turned a $4 toy robot into an AI companion with one web page

Category: other

Tags: robotics, ai-companion, webusb, hardware-hacking, maker

Score: 6.3/10 (Innovation: 6, Technical: 6, Documentation: 8, Utility: 5)

A maker project that repurposes a cheap toy robot into an AI companion using an Android phone as the body and a Node.js server as the brain. It combines WebUSB motor control, cloud speech/chat models, and a fine-tuned 0.8B reflex model for low-latency commands. The detailed documentation and hardware hacking make it an interesting but niche project.

Target audience: hobbyist makers, robotics enthusiasts, AI tinkerers

Repository: https://github.com/beasaltfish/bot-reborn · JavaScript · MIT · 2 stars

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