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Microduck

pollen-robotics.com

241–250 of 415 posts

Re: Microduck

#241
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not much to say, really; it controls my house in Home Assistant using an LLM, and a STT/TTS server. It acts as the Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition, with a trigger word and whatnot. It's basically like giving an Alexa, Siri, or Gemini a body. It moves, show "emotions", comments when someone enter the room, uses the camera to see who entered the room and comment on that, make comments when my 3D printer finishes,…

Huh, that's pretty cool! How much of that behavior did you need to roll yourself vs what was already there?

And since Reachy's software and SDK are pretty open, it's trivial for a coding agent to learn how to communicate with the robot to achieve your desired outcome.

Re: Microduck

#242
post #192

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Plato thought writing was a lie: > If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written...And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not…

> Plato thought writing was a lie Which is an intriguing argument considering he .. wrote it down and not just once. He was a prolific author. He also speaks _through_ other people, mostly Socrates, which complicates matters quite a bit. You're getting a narrative as told by someone inside the narrative about the nature of narration itself. I'd be hesitant to linearize Plato. There's quite a bit of subtlety to his ar…

Second that it's unlikely that Plato agrees with Socrates on writing in the Phaedrus. When reading Plato you should think of him as writing dialogues for people to see various arguments and arguments develop over the books, for example Timaeus goes against positions held by Socrates and even more so later in the Parmenides.

Plato is not linear either and if you really want to understand what Plato held you have to look at what the academy taught and what the Platonism became. Though clearly Platonism develops and changes and has various different flavors that academics pick out such as middle-platonism and neo-platonism. I would say it's not definite what Plato believed and one might say that he entertained multiple ideas at the same time, though clearly despised many positions.

Re: Microduck

#243
post #71

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That's a completely different class of robot. The Beni robot is just a toy, it's just connect the app and drive it around, record videos and do some fancy tricks like flips. It is not meant to be a platform you program yourself. The Microduck is meant to be a hacker toy. Train it yourself, write software, hack it, etc. It depends what you're trying to get for your daughter. Is it something to get her into robotics? T…

The creators of Beni seem to have promised that the platform will be open (including sim2real parts of Beni). I have ordered Beni for my family. It's sturdy and more practical for careless fun.

Their current messaging is "we're busy, no promises" on dev kit or API access -- where did you see this open promise? I'm super curious.

UPDATE: That's their kickstarter customer service. Their subreddit has founders liberally promising API/devkit access, targeted at Q1 '27

Re: Microduck

#244
post #193

I found a few open-source small bipedal robots on the internet. There are actually many open-source robots available: [1]. https://robotics.umich.edu/news/2024/a-smaller-simpler-biped... https://github.com/daviddoo02/Legolas-an-open-source-biped [2]. https://github.com/MuShibo/Micro-Wheeled_leg-Robot [3]. https://github.com/Yuexuan9/Tinker Quadruped: [1]. https://github.com/stanfordroboticsclub/StanfordQuadruped [2].…

I would love the simplest one of these with just wheels and an arm. Could do so much with it.

Re: Microduck

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the horror of pulling animals out of their natural habitat, but if you are using this as a blanket statement towards all living animals then you should read up on the history of the domestication of wolves (dogs). It was born of a beneficial relationship to both humans and wolves and i personally find my relationship with my dogs to be extremely fulfilling and i believe my dogs do as well. I have no inte…

> I have no interest in a relationship with a robot. I think I could, if it meant I could keep the experience of having a pet. I've had cats going back to my twenties. I dearly love my fifteen y/o cat. She's my last cat, though. As I approach fifty I've grown tired of hefting bags of litter and food, stooping to clean up after her, taking her to the vet, and administering her medication. When she's finally dead (whic…

Yes, and robot pets aren’t going to look like clankers. They’ll be warm and furry and imitate the sounds and movements of real pets. I think people still imagine robots as some cold metallic insert-Stephen-Hawking-voice thing, and it’s pretty clear even with today’s tech that’s just not what they’re going to be.

Re: Microduck

#247
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The creators of Beni seem to have promised that the platform will be open (including sim2real parts of Beni). I have ordered Beni for my family. It's sturdy and more practical for careless fun.

Their current messaging is "we're busy, no promises" on dev kit or API access -- where did you see this open promise? I'm super curious. UPDATE: That's their kickstarter customer service. Their subreddit has founders liberally promising API/devkit access, targeted at Q1 '27

i think i heard someplace that ssh/adb is open by default, if true, that is ENOUGH for me to take over and do the rest on my own.

Re: Microduck

#248
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their current messaging is "we're busy, no promises" on dev kit or API access -- where did you see this open promise? I'm super curious. UPDATE: That's their kickstarter customer service. Their subreddit has founders liberally promising API/devkit access, targeted at Q1 '27

i think i heard someplace that ssh/adb is open by default, if true, that is ENOUGH for me to take over and do the rest on my own.

That would be awesome. Probably worth getting a v1 and not upgrading the firmware just to be sure

Re: Microduck

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If the IP holders ever get their shit together Well they have had a lot of time to get their shit together, and its not even happened a little tiny bit. But maybe one day they will die? And when the Mormon church inherits the IP they might use it a bit better.

> Well they have had a lot of time to get their shit together, and its not even happened a little tiny bit. Yeah, they struggle... Though... the Unity-engine based Shadowrun(s)/Battletech were decent. Mechwarrior 5:Mercs (not Clans) with it's doing-the-heavy-lifting mods is fun. But that seems more like them half listening to others-with-a-clue than themselves getting their act together. It is frustrating knowing the…

Oh the video games arent toooooo bad.

The Battletech devs sold out to Paradox, and then demergered, and when they came out again they no longer own the rights to their own Battletech game. So even if they wanted to do another one it would have to be completely different.

Mechwarrior 5 is slowly finding the right place to be, but they fired their lead artist so I dont have a lot of hope anymore.

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