A small desk robot that sits beside the keyboard and reacts to what I'm working on — custom tracked chassis, embedded firmware, and a personality that develops over time.
Role
Design and build — chassis, electronics, firmware
Timeline
2026 · ongoing
Status
Prototype
Stack
Embedded C++ · OLED · I2C · 3D CAD · Electronics
Concept render — the tracked drive base and the display head that gives Gizmo its face.
Engineering drawing — the display head lifts cleanly off the tracked base, so the two halves can be built and iterated separately.
First sign of life — the face running on an SSD1306 OLED over I2C, before it has a body to live in.
01
The idea
A companion that lives beside the keyboard and reacts to what I'm working on — not a voice assistant, not a gadget that needs charging and forgetting, but a small machine with a face and a temper. The screen is the whole personality: a few pixels of expression that shift with what's happening on the desk, developing quirks over time instead of shipping with them.
02
Where it stands
The face came first. It runs on an SSD1306 OLED over I2C, driven by prototype firmware — blinking, sulking, and glaring from a bare module on the desk while the rest of the robot exists as CAD. The chassis design splits into two parts: a tracked drive base and a display head that lifts off it, so the electronics can be iterated without rebuilding the body around them each time.
03
Why hardware
Hardware is the one place a bug can't be hotfixed. Everything else I build can be patched after the fact; a chassis that doesn't fit or a board that browns out has to be caught before it's made. That constraint is the appeal — it forces the kind of care that software lets you defer.
