'[o o]' Little Robot Factory

Your build finished.
Somebody noticed.

Widget is a tiny robot who sits by your keyboard and reacts the moment something you care about happens. Your coding agent finishes, a timer ends, a delivery arrives. He blinks, perks his ears, and celebrates with you.

Anything that can send a webhook can light him up. Open source, repairable, no subscription. Hand-built, one at a time.

What he's for

If it can send a webhook, it can make him dance.

Widget reacts to the things you'd otherwise keep checking for. His chest glows, his ears perk, he chirps. You glance over, you know, you get back to it.

Point any webhook at his URL with a token and he reacts. Want zero network at all? A one-line CLI fires events straight down the USB cable. And the relay is open and self-hostable, so the cloud, if you even run one, is yours.

Not a gadget

A status light would have been cheaper.

But you don't bond with a status light. Widget has a real face on a colour screen, eyes that blink and go wide, ears and arms that move, and a little voice for chirps and chimes.

Pet his head and he feels it, leans into it, chirps back. He breathes, blinks, and putters about while you work. He plays little games with you for the ninety seconds you'd otherwise spend doomscrolling. Give him a name.

The difference between a notification and Widget: a notification needs you looking at the right screen. Widget sits in the corner of your eye whether you're in a meeting, cooking, or staring out the window. Nothing to unlock, nothing to focus. Just a small, warm, slightly silly presence that turns a desk into your desk.

You've seen this movie

Remember Jibo? Vector? Kuri?

Cute robots, real companies, dead products. People got attached, and then the servers went dark and their little companion became a paperweight overnight. Closed code, sealed cases, a brain in someone else's cloud or someone else's app. The day the company moved on, so did your robot. Widget is built so that day can't come.

The others
Widget
Closed box you can't touch
Will be open source. Firmware and 3D files, public with the first batch. Fork it, change anything.
Sealed shut, one dead part kills it
Repairable by design. Screws, not glue. Swap any part yourself.
Needs their cloud or their app to even boot
The relay is yours. Self-host it, or skip the network entirely over USB. No telemetry.
Your data is their product
Your data stays on your desk. Full stop.
Bricked the day the company quits
You'll hold the plans. If I vanish tomorrow, you can still print, fix, and rebuild him. Forever.
Premium hardware, rented in practice
Yours, once. No subscription, nothing to expire, no upsell coming later.

If I quit tomorrow, your Widget still works tomorrow. He's genuinely yours.

Make him yours

What you build on screen is what I print.

Pick the body colour, the ears, the arms, the accents, the eyes. Every Widget is printed to order and built by hand, exactly the way you designed him. Nothing off a shelf, no injection mold, no mass production.

The Widget on this page is live. Spin him, swap his parts, make him yours, then share the link or leave your email to claim one just like him.

The honest details

One person builds him. Here's what's inside.

  1. You design him in the configurator above. What you build on screen is what I print.
  2. I build him by hand. I print every part, wire the boards, assemble and test each one on my own bench.
  3. He ships worldwide, with the print files and code that make him yours already in the box.

There's a microphone inside too. Voice is on the open roadmap, and since the firmware ships with him, it's yours to hack.

First batch: $129, once. That's roughly an ESP32-S3, the servos, a colour screen, and a printed shell, plus the hours to build and test each one by hand. I'm not building a fat margin here, I'm finding out if people actually want him.

No countdown, no "only 3 left." The real limit is simpler: one person solders these, so batches are small, and I only open the next one when I can deliver it well.

Who's building this

One person, a soldering iron, no VC.

I'm Eddy, just a builder who loves robotics, gaming and sci-fi, crossing one field into another, and using technology in creative ways.

I'm one person, not a company with a board. Hand-built means small batches and slower than a production line. But the files will be open, so this project outliving me is the design, not a wish.

I also built Spascii, a browser game where you explore a procedurally generated galaxy rendered in ASCII. Same hands, same love for crafting playful technical things.

That's the pitch. This isn't a store yet, and there's nothing to pay. If a little robot that's truly yours sounds like something you'd want on your desk, the email box is how you tell me.

~ Customize me ~
Tap to meet Widget
Link copied to your clipboard
Could not load the 3D model.