The AI chat robot ball(?) that Leo definitely did NOT endorse

isai76 · July 6, 2026, 10:00am

A few weeks back Leo mentioned a device that he can speak to and it will answer back. I had to get one! It took so long to get here that I was refunded and it still arrived. Since march I have to drive a half hour away to donate plasma, so a win is a win.

After signing into it, it was very based in China, weather and all that so I created my own server on a linux machine, I needed it to talk to my server and had a hard time, Tried Gemini first, I only use the free tiers of Gemini and Claude.ai, Gemini got me started but it felt like I was stuck on a loop trying to get it to work. After a few hours, including the wait after I used up my free tier of Claude code, but finally got it to work. It is communicating with my server but then would not speak to me. It could hear me, the read out would say what I asked, “What time is it”, but never said anything. That took another hour or so and now it is responding in English.

My next step is to connect this little ball to my Odysseus server, it can reach out to the internet including real time weather, etc. Today is a work day so I will do it later during the week or the weekend. I endorse this ball IF you run your own server for it.

Leo · July 9, 2026, 1:41am

You’ve done a lot more than I have. I think it’s an ESP32 chip in there, so it should be relatively modifiable.

I’m pleased you were able to get it to do what you wanted! Are you going to post your code on Github? Did you have to write new firmware?

I did that with the ESP32 S3 Box I bought some time ago by modifying the reference firmware. GitHub - leolaporte/esp-box-obi-wan: ESP32-S3-BOX-3 firmware fork: voice client for the Obi-Wan backend. 'Hi ESP' wake word, VAD, Whisper+Claude+Piper round-trip, Obi-Wan home screen. Fork of Espressif esp-box (Apache 2.0). · GitHub . I wonder if the same method would work with the orb? I’ll have to give it a try.

isai76 · July 9, 2026, 7:41pm

Thank you for the link to your GitHub, Leo And indeed it is an ESP32, amazing what it can do in such a small little board!

There’s no real code to share except that I used Claude Code to help me. It was a slog because I’m on the free tier. I’m a man limited to what I have in my meager bank account, ha. I exchanged a ton of info, including links to the actual device itself and I don’t remember if Claude gave me the server for the orb or if I found it and it helped me install it. It’s working and very slow. It’s not the orb’s fault, I just don’t have a GPU. I haven’t had a chance to work on it this week but I have on the computer I have the server installed the Odyssey harness, that’s the thing that is very slow. Not even sure if it’s worth it. It’s still fun as hell to get it to work, despite a robot helping me program my robot.

This is a screenshot of the server running on my machine,