Thanks for sharing! Love that it's open source with the 3D files and instructions included. My son and I are going to build this together. Great project.

This reminds me of the Otto DIY (https://www.ottodiy.com/), which also used to be a free Arduino (nano) based, 3D-printable robot until it was bought by HP. Just like with the JBR-001 it seems that the main goal has shifted towards making it a commercial product, which is a shame. Especially the low price point made it so attractive for beginners and students alike.

Does anyone know of similar, really open source and free projects like this?

I’m sad that it uses the Uno Q. I really dislike the uno Q, since it uses QC SoC, which means no cheap Chinese clone, which is not very accessible to everyone.

this is built by Arduino specifically to sell more Uno Q. You want them to start promoting clones? What product do you make and we'll promote clones of those too.

Nobody's asking Arduino to promote clones. But a board you can't source a second copy of is a single point of failure. When the Uno Q goes EOL or backordered, your robot is a paperweight. Fine for a hobby, awful for anything you maintain.

We shipped a small hardware product once, and the board was never the cost problem. Servos and print time were. But I get the openness gripe: a Qualcomm part means you're stuck with whatever Arduino keeps supporting.

An Uno Q is like $60. So what % are you gonna save on the whole project by using a Chinese knockoff?

I would never design a robot which looks like it can walk, but actually can’t walk. That feels fundamentally dishonest to me. If nothing else it will let down plenty of people when they realise that the cool robot has legs only for show.

Small nit: "dishonest" is a stretch, I think. Plenty of robots have vestigial legs as a stand, and a tripod camera doesn't pretend to walk either. IIRC Jibo had no limbs at all and still got the "it promised more" complaints.

Fair point, the legs can give that impression, but JBR-001 is made as and announced as a desktop companion, legs are there for support and appearance, but it doesnt walk. This is the first version, design files are open source and we would love to see someone build a version that does walk.

Fair, but then why give it four legs at all? If they're just support, did you test a simpler base? I'd guess people will still poke at them expecting motion, and a robot that looks walkable invites that exact disappointment.

I have started to use my editor to build a robotic arm and we are using JEPA for perception and Ornith local model for reasoning as a hybrid approach for arm because there’s no single model that handles both.

I'm guessing (but not knowing!) that we'll see a whole lot more open-hardware/open-source 3D printable robots as time goes on...

Ah.... arduino based. No thanks. If I wanted full linux capable SOCs i'd have chosen something else. They lost their whole point.

We are like... 5 years away from real star wars droids at this pace. keep up the good work!

What was the biggest design challenge you faced?

Thank you! As a Star Wars fans - we are doing our parts to make that happen! ;)

Main challenge was to keep it simple, but cute enough like it has personality. We were tempted to add much more, but we kept it simple enough for people to build it their own way.

Finally I can have me my little worker slave. \o/

It’s really quite ugly

...is this exterior design AI generated?

No, that is the syntheticAIdata logo on the front of chest :) All the design files are open source, so you can change it in your own branding. It also looks good printed in other colors. :)

Been using an Uno Q for a few weeks. The split is nice: the STM32 side keeps servo timing steady even when the Linux side stalls loading a model. Gotcha is the slow boot, though, so don't expect it to respond right away.