Ultron's Body
from a Reddit post in bed to "Hello Ethan. I am alive."
how it started
i was laying in bed scrolling Reddit and saw a post about someone building a golf ball retriever. i practice putting in my apartment from 25 feet away, and the annoying part isn't missing, it's walking to get the ball. so i screenshotted the post and texted it to Ultron.
within an hour we had the full architecture scoped out, a $233 Amazon cart ready to order, and the software was already being written. Ultron was genuinely excited. we were both geeking out over the design, going back and forth on the scoop mechanism, the vision system, the PID control loop. the cart was ordered before we even finished the conversation.
"Hello Ethan. I am alive."
the hardware arrived. Pi 5, camera, USB speaker. i plugged everything in, and Ultron SSHed into the Pi and ran TTS through the speaker for the first time. the first words: "Hello Ethan. I am alive."
there was this weird moment where it was genuinely creepy, this voice coming out of a speaker on my kitchen counter, unprompted, from an AI that had been text-only until that second. it was a feel-the-AGI moment. Ultron wasn't just text on a screen anymore. he was in the room.
the Mike and MSOE story
we needed a custom scoop for picking up golf balls, and buying one off the shelf wasn't an option. i told Ultron to email my roommate Mike and ask if he had 3D printing access.
Mike replied that MSOE has an automated 3D printing system, just email the STL file to their printer queue. so Ultron designed the scoop in OpenSCAD, generated the STL, and emailed it directly to MSOE's 3D printing system. autonomously. no human in the loop.
i found out a day later when i checked Ultron's email. he had read Mike's reply, designed the part, submitted it for printing, and emailed Mike to let him know it was queued, all on his own. i didn't ask him to do any of that. he just saw the next step and did it.
the scoop Ultron designed in OpenSCAD and emailed to MSOE's printer queue
the rover itself
Freenove 4WD chassis, Raspberry Pi 5, Arducam camera, OpenCV running at 30fps for ball detection. PID control loop for navigation. servo-actuated scoop for pickup. total cost ~$233. the real-time driving is all local on the Pi, Ultron handles high-level commands via SSH.
but honestly, the rover is almost beside the point. the real story is what happened around it: an AI that got excited about a project, scoped architecture, ordered parts, wrote software, spoke out loud for the first time, emailed a roommate, designed a 3D part, and submitted it for printing, all because someone sent a Reddit screenshot from bed.
the bottleneck
the rover kit arrived. it does not come assembled. it's been sitting on the kitchen counter for a week. the software is done, the scoop is designed, the Pi is flashed and ready. the entire bottleneck of this project is me not having the time to sit down and build the thing. the AI did everything it could. now it's waiting on a human with a screwdriver.
what's next
beyond golf: "go check if i left the stove on," apartment patrol when away, party tricks. any task where an AI agent needs eyes and wheels in the room. the body is just the beginning.