This palm-sized robot dog has a Nokia battery and a customizable LEGO-compatible back

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Petoi has been shrinking Boston Dynamics down to desk size for almost a decade now. Dr. Rongzhong Li started the company in his dorm lab in 2016, after a video of his open-source robot cat prototype went viral. That cat became Nybble, a laser-cut wooden kitty, and it was followed by Bittle, a palm-sized robot dog that ended up in classrooms, research labs, and a surprising number of home offices. Petoi says it has shipped more than 30,000 robots to over 60 countries, all running its open-source OpenCat framework. Each new model has gotten smaller, smarter, and easier to build, which brings us to the newest pup in the litter.

Meet Quaddle, a palm-sized robot dog that walks, glides, spins, and does backflips using just four servos. That’s half what Bittle uses in its legs and roughly a third of what most quadrupeds need, thanks to a spring-loaded linkage Petoi calls the MinDoF leg, which lets one motor drive both the shoulder and the knee. It weighs about 6 ounces, snaps together without screws, and takes LEGO bricks on its back. You can teach it tricks by physically moving its legs, chat with it, or code it in anything from beginner blocks to ROS. Prices start at $179, which is pretty reasonable for a dog that never needs walking.

Designer: Petoi

How one servo runs an entire leg

Each of Quaddle’s legs hangs off a single servo, with a spring and a four-bar linkage doing the job a second motor normally would. As the servo swings the upper leg, the linkage folds the knee up and straightens it again, turning one rotating shaft into a proper step. Petoi calls this the MinDoF leg, short for Minimal Degrees of Freedom, a degree of freedom being one independent way a joint can move. The spring clips onto different anchor points, changing how stiff or bouncy each leg feels. In Petoi’s tabletop tests, Quaddle walks about one body length per second, turns 90° in a single step cycle, and climbs onto a ledge as tall as its own knee.

Walking machines driven by a single crank go back to Pafnuty Chebyshev, the Russian mathematician whose 1870s linkage turned rotation into a surprisingly lifelike stride. Theo Jansen’s wind-powered Strandbeests on Dutch beaches run on the same basic idea, and Quaddle feels like their tiny, battery-powered cousin. Petoi added one more trick by fitting small bearings to the tips of the feet. Angle the legs just right and those bearings become wheels, letting Quaddle glide across a smooth desk at around three body lengths per second without a single extra motor. Fewer motors also means less weight, less cost, and less battery drain, which is how the whole dog comes in at roughly 6 ounces.

Teach it tricks by hand, then teach it in code

On the Buddy and Scout models, every leg servo reports its position back to the robot, so you can teach Quaddle a move by simply grabbing its legs. Tap to start recording, guide the legs through whatever silly dance you have in mind, and tap again to have it play the motion back. There’s no app or code involved, and Petoi says you can teach it a basic walk in about ten seconds. Recorded moves can be pulled into Petoi’s Skill Composer software for fine-tuning and shared with other Quaddle owners. For a kid, this is probably the fastest route from “I wonder if” to a robot actually doing the thing.

Buddy and Scout split their thinking across two ESP32-S3 chips, one for motion and balance and one for voice chat and smart home control. A physical slide switch cuts power to the AI chip entirely, which is great for privacy and for days when your robot dog gets a bit too chatty. Coding starts with drag-and-drop blocks, moves to Python or MicroPython, and eventually reaches the Arduino C++ firmware. Bigger projects can mount a Raspberry Pi Zero on its back or plug into ROS, the software framework most research robots run on. A browser-based simulator runs the same code as the real robot, so you can test ideas on a laptop or even a phone with no robot in sight.

LEGO bricks, a Nokia battery, and three Quaddles to pick from

The top of Quaddle’s shell takes LEGO bricks, and Petoi will publish printable shells and mounts for anyone with a 3D printer. Petoi’s own demos have turned it into a walking LEGO AT-AT, a waddling biped called the NanoDuck, and a rover on Mecanum wheels, which use angled rollers to slide sideways. Power comes from a swappable Nokia-format phone battery, the same BL-5C shape that lived inside Nokia’s famously indestructible early-2000s handsets. Quaddle ships with the bigger 1,800 mAh BL-10C cell, good for roughly 1 to 1.5 hours of walking depending on the model. Plug it into USB-C while you code and it charges as it runs, so marathon debugging sessions are fair game.

Builder PLUS ($179) handles walking and coding, Buddy ($219) adds AI chat and teach-by-hand, and Scout ($269) adds a sensor head that detects gestures, light, distance, and people. All three are priced at $144, $175, and $215, with deliveries starting in December. For context, Petoi’s own Bittle X lists at $279, Unitree’s Go2 starts around $1,600, and Sony’s Aibo launched in the US at $2,900. Petoi spent a decade shrinking big robots down to desk size, and Quaddle shows the smartest way to shrink one further is to give it fewer parts.

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This Tiny Home Wraps Its Living Room in Glass and Keeps the Main Bedroom Downstairs

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Tall, divided windows wrap around Leah’s living room, giving this small home the appearance of a glazed garden pavilion. Offered by Swedish builder Vagabond Haven, the modular design combines an open living area with a separate downstairs bedroom and a sleeping loft. The company’s illustrations show a cottage-like interior, with white paneling, pale wood tones, and space for conventional furniture.

Leah measures 12 meters long and 3.45 meters wide, with a stated living area of 52 square meters, approximately 560 square feet, including the loft. It accommodates four sleepers. This isn’t a towable retreat: its timber structure sits on a steel chassis without wheels, and transportation requires a low-bed truck and crane. Choosing a site means planning for that delivery.

Designer: Vagabond Haven

The exterior uses vertical Thermopine siding beneath a steel-sheet roof. Vagabond Haven specifies 20 centimeters of mineral wool insulation in the walls and roof, alongside triple-glazed windows. Visually, the most consequential decision is concentrating the largest windows around the living area. That treatment gives the shared space a distinct identity, while smaller openings punctuate the more private rooms.

Inside, the illustrated kitchen follows an L-shaped arrangement, with a sink beneath a window and cabinetry extending around the corner. A freestanding dining table seats four beside the tall glazing. Keeping the table separate from the counter provides a dedicated eating surface, though it also occupies circulation space. Appliances and furnishings are configurable, so the pictured arrangement shouldn’t be mistaken for the base specification.

A corridor connects the communal area to the bathroom and main bedroom at the opposite end. That separation is useful: the bed doesn’t have to share the same open room as dinner, television, or visitors. The bedroom illustration includes a double bed, wardrobes, shelving, and a desk. Crucially, the primary sleeping space is downstairs, making the staircase optional for an owner’s nightly routine.

Upstairs, the loft is reached by stairs with integrated cabinets. The illustrated arrangement places a low bed beneath the pitched ceiling, with a desk nearby. Headroom remains the compromise here, particularly toward the roof edges. Roof windows are optional. Downstairs, bathroom choices include a glazed shower, washing machine provision, and flushing, composting, or incinerating toilets.

Leah costs approximately $66,300 unfurnished, $77,500 fully furnished, or $93,100 fully off-grid, excluding VAT. Those distinctions matter when budgeting: the lowest figure isn’t the illustrated, equipped interior. Leah’s strongest spatial choice is giving everyday living and the main bedroom proper downstairs rooms, while reserving the low-ceilinged loft for whoever actually wants to climb upstairs.

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This DIY PlayStation 2 Handheld Gives a Foldable Phone Screen a New Job

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The PlayStation 2 was never something you could casually slip into a bag, unless you planned to bring a screen and controller along for the ride. The PlayStation 2 DUO brings those pieces together in an unofficial DIY handheld with an unusual trick. Its screen actually bends in the middle, letting you fold the console when it’s time to put the game away.

There’s plenty of familiar territory around that unfamiliar fold. A purple shell surrounds the display, with a D-pad and the four recognizable PlayStation symbols sitting above two analog sticks. Start and Select occupy the upper corners, while speaker grilles sit below the controls. The arrangement looks reassuringly conventional, which is probably helpful when the screen between your hands is doing something rather unconventional.

Designer: LCLDIY

That screen is a single flexible panel, rather than two separate displays interrupted by a hinge. The project’s earlier development notes describe a 7.8-inch screen salvaged from a foldable phone. It gives the DUO a generous central canvas when opened, without committing the handheld to that same width inside a bag. Of course, making a screen bend doesn’t make its limitations magically disappear.

The panel needs room to curve, and forcing it into a sharp fold would damage it. That requirement shaped the casing and its hinge, leaving a broad bend instead of squeezing the halves completely flat together. It’s a less tidy package than a closed clamshell might suggest, but the extra space has a practical purpose: keeping that delicate display in one piece.

There’s genuine PlayStation 2 hardware inside as well, rather than a newer computer pretending to be Sony’s console. Getting it to fit required cutting down the original motherboard and rearranging its supporting electronics. A 3D-printed enclosure brings everything together, turning equipment once tethered to a television into something you can hold between both hands. The nostalgia extends beyond the buttons, in other words.

The folding body makes the electronics more complicated, of course. Separate control boards occupy the two sides, with a ribbon cable linking them across the center. The trimmed motherboard also carries a small cooling fan and heatsink. There’s quite a bit happening underneath that playful exterior, particularly for a device whose moving parts include the surface you’re supposed to be staring at.

Folding it up reduces the footprint, but doesn’t automatically make this a pocket console. The published project information doesn’t establish its weight, closed dimensions, or battery runtime, so there’s little reason to start planning an entire flight around it. More importantly, this is a completed hobby build, not an upcoming Sony handheld with a price tag and a place on store shelves.

Enclosure printing files and a PCB archive are available on the project page, although they don’t amount to a complete assembly guide. Recreating the DUO still involves board modification and careful work around a flexible display. That might temper the urge to make one immediately, especially if your experience with PlayStation hardware mostly involves inserting discs rather than cutting up circuit boards.

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