Why I put a robot on my desk
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On 6 September 2026 I ordered a robot. Not a vacuum cleaner, not a toy: a Reachy Mini Wireless, a small open-source desk robot made by Pollen Robotics, a French company now part of Hugging Face.
The idea
For months I had been working every day with an AI assistant. It reads and writes my notes, keeps my projects in order, drafts, checks, reminds. It is useful, and it lives entirely in text files. It has no face, no ears of its own, no way to notice that I just walked into the room.
The first idea was simple: give it a body. A robot on the desk that recognises me, turns its head when I speak, and shows with a small gesture that something is waiting for me.
What the kit promises
The Wireless version works without a computer. Inside the body there is a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, a battery and Wi-Fi. The robot has:
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Eyes | one wide-angle camera, in the head |
| Ears | four microphones |
| Voice | a 5 W speaker |
| Movement | six motors move the head, one turns the body, two drive the antennas |
| Brain | the Compute Module 4, programmed in Python |
It arrives as a kit, to be assembled without soldering. The shop announced up to 90 days of delivery. It came in 38.
The plan
I am not a roboticist. I build websites. So the plan was to learn in small steps, and to measure each one rather than claim it:
- assemble it and make it boot;
- lock it down: change default passwords, check what can reach it;
- try the apps that already exist before writing anything;
- give it a voice that runs locally;
- have it read my morning briefing aloud;
- make it a presence on the desk.
Reality reordered it within a week: recognising my face jumped ahead of everything, because it was the most visible step and the others depended on it.
What changed along the way
Seven weeks later, the plan held, but the idea moved. On 25 October I wrote this in my notes: the robot is no longer the body of my assistant. It is a creature of its own, which may or may not hook up to the assistant. At home it can be connected and powerful. Out in the world, at a demo, it should live in a closed, safe little universe.
It does not have a name yet. I am looking for one.
This notebook tells the story in order, one step per post, with the numbers.