Show HN: Browse 61 3D Printable Robots (opens in new tab)

(orobot.io)

14 pointsxanderjanz11d ago3 comments

Robotics is advancing really fast lately, with AI inference, different controllers, software, and parts always changing. I wanted a place that supports many device types, Raspberry Pi, NVDA Jetson, Arduino, ESP32, hardware sources, and maximizes for printability. Instructables, Github, and Thingiverse are currently popular but aren't really focused on robotics, So I built orobot.io to try and make printing robots as standardized and accessible as possible. It uses a lot of Agent built content custom to each project, and every project is designed to be used by humans or your agent.

Features:

- Photos and Estimated Prices for all projects

- Links back to source GitHub projects

- LLMs write descriptions and tips on how to build

- View + Download 3d printable STL files in browser

- BOM purchase links are kept up to date with LLMs checking Amazon link health

- LLMs write Javascript install and controller wrappers custom to each project so a single one-click install works across many frameworks and controller types

- Public skill files, clis, and prompts let your agent do everything it needs to walk you through the complexity.

It's still pretty new, so somethings are broken, and there's a lot more I want to build. But I'm very interested to have people try it out let me know if they want to use something like this and give me feedback about where they ran into problems so I can fix it. Thank you HN!

3 comments

dchuk10d ago

This is awesome thank you for building this! I’ve wanted to try building some sort of companion robot for my kids to play with, that leverages edge voice AI models and likely an api connection to one of the big SOTA providers for the brain, with a custom system prompt to have a very simple child-like personality. I feel like it would be neat to use an android phone as the “face” where you get a nice screen to render on, compute for the edge models, and the forward and rear facing cams for the vision all included. One of those daydream projects…

xanderjanzOP10d ago

Thanks!

- Checkout Reachy Mini or Stack-chan on orobotio, those are the top 2 SOTA AI personality robots, what you're looking for! Not an exact match, but I see the vision, it's definitely buildable.

- What AI services are you most familiar with? Claude? GPT? OpenRouter? HuggingFace? Gemini? Something else? I'm planning to support all of them, but will be helpful to know which would help you most.

- What would you estimate your skill level with programming, 3d printing, and building robotics electronics? beginner - moderate - expert?

Join my discord, and I'd love to set up a call with you. https://discord.gg/DWfUsCNVs

Thanks for checking it out!

xanderjanzOP11d ago

@Jinyibruceli

Hi thanks for the question! HN flagged your comment, so I'll respond here.

You said: "I tried building a hexapod last year and the hardest part wasn't the printing, it was figuring out which servo library worked with which controller board. The Github repos were all over the place with dependencies. Does orobot normalize the BOM and software stack info, or is it mainly aggregating the STLs? I'm curious if the agent-generated content catches stuff like "this uses a deprecated ROS package" or incompatible firmware versions."

1) Yep it normalizes BOMs, whether it's on personal blogs, google docs, github, markdown, html, wherever. Agreed they are all over the place and hard to navigate, but LLM agents are really good at this. As much as it can, it tries to build a single one-click Amazon add to cart with everything in it. If parts aren't on Amazon, it prefers Alibaba next, or they're linked separately. Because some projects online are forks and only have BOM lists for their additions, so you need parts from the fork and the original BOM list, orobot puts both in one spot.

2) Yes orobot writes on-device javascript commands to git pull and run Makefiles or do whatever else it has to do to bootstrap. And that's installed over wifi through the app.

3) Yes the Agent install code definitely should fixup deprecated ROS libraries. Either internally to orobot.io, and it even will post push requests upstream, if there are bugs buried in the source GitHub project. Weather or not it has I'm not sure. Some of this is really new.

I don't want to promise anything I haven't tried myself. Can you link which hexapod github projects you were trying and if they're on orobotio already and what controller board and servos you have? I can try to look up for you how well supported it is right now.

Thanks for the feedback!

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