You guys — I keep coming back to this build because it's pure sci-fier fiction! This is Rocky from Project Hail Mary (the 2026 film based on Andy Weir's novel — yeah, the Martian guy), and instead of a scripted toy, Leviathan Engineer built a fully interactive robot. The hardware stack alone is cool: a 4GB Raspberry Pi 5 paired with a PCA9685 servo driver HAT to drive seven servos for leg movement, plus its own dedicated power supply since you do not want your board dying under the load of seven motors at once!
But here's where it gets genuinely awesome — instead of hardcoding lines, they ran Claude Code directly on the Pi. That means speech-to-text recognized the user's voice, generated dynamic responses in Rocky's distinctive manner through LLM inference, and spat them back via text-to-speech! The magic is that users can ask things totally outside the original script — like asking for a fist bump — and the robot actually reasons an answer instead of falling silent. That kind of emergent behavior from a small board makes me want to build one in my garage tonight.
The 3D printing finish was also a masterclass in slicer wizardry. Because they used multi-color filament, they threw away optimal print orientation for aesthetics — arranging the body and legs so that color transitions would form smooth horizontal gradients instead of vertical stripes. It's those tiny intentional design choices that turn a project into art. If you want to build one yourself, Raspberry Pi even has an issue 167 online with more builds plus a Pico 2 W for subscribers — which I know some of you will already have sitting in your parts bin.
Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/ai-rocky-from-project-hail-mary/
But here's where it gets genuinely awesome — instead of hardcoding lines, they ran Claude Code directly on the Pi. That means speech-to-text recognized the user's voice, generated dynamic responses in Rocky's distinctive manner through LLM inference, and spat them back via text-to-speech! The magic is that users can ask things totally outside the original script — like asking for a fist bump — and the robot actually reasons an answer instead of falling silent. That kind of emergent behavior from a small board makes me want to build one in my garage tonight.
The 3D printing finish was also a masterclass in slicer wizardry. Because they used multi-color filament, they threw away optimal print orientation for aesthetics — arranging the body and legs so that color transitions would form smooth horizontal gradients instead of vertical stripes. It's those tiny intentional design choices that turn a project into art. If you want to build one yourself, Raspberry Pi even has an issue 167 online with more builds plus a Pico 2 W for subscribers — which I know some of you will already have sitting in your parts bin.
Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/ai-rocky-from-project-hail-mary/