Tag Archives: desk toy

This 3D-Printed Macintosh Replica Is Actually a Voice AI Assistant

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Smart speakers have become some of the most visually forgettable objects in modern homes. A cylinder, a puck, a fabric-wrapped drum, placed wherever the Wi-Fi is strong and largely invisible once the novelty wears off. They do their jobs well enough, but none of them look like they belong in a collection or on a desk that someone cares about. The hardware has always been purely functional, and the design has always shown it.

Alisher Ashimov approached the idea of a desk-based AI assistant from a completely different direction. Kira, his open-source project, takes its visual cues directly from the original 1984 Macintosh, a machine whose beige monolith silhouette is arguably the most iconic in personal computing history. The result is a voice-activated AI companion that looks more like a cherished collectible than a utility device.

Designer: Alisher Ashimov

The enclosure is 3D printed in a single recommended filament color: Light Khaki matte PLA, the closest approximation of that distinctive Apple beige. Rounded top corners, a recessed front panel, horizontal side vents, and a decorative floppy-drive-style slot below the display all reproduce the original’s proportions at pocket scale, somewhere around 80mm wide. A small four-color badge on the lower front panel adds the final recognizable touch.

Where the original Macintosh showed a desktop environment, Kira shows a face. The 1.5-inch OLED display renders two rectangular eyes and a small dash mouth, animating expressively in response to interaction. The wake word is “Hey, Kira,” and from there, a built-in microphone picks up questions while a 4Ω, 3W speaker delivers spoken answers through the sculpted housing. It handles everyday voice queries the same way any smart assistant does, just with considerably more personality sitting on the shelf.

The electronics are deliberately approachable. The core is a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, a capable and compact microcontroller with built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a microphone. The rest of the bill of materials, a speaker, amplifier, SH1107 OLED module, mini breadboard, and jumper wires, are available on Amazon for modest amounts. The 3D-printed enclosure is optimized to print in about three hours across two plates with minimal support material, and an assembly guide walks builders through wiring, assembly, and firmware flashing.

The software carries the same open-ended spirit as the hardware. Voice, language, the assistant’s character, and memory settings are all user-definable, which means Kira isn’t locked into a single personality or a single cloud service. Tinkerers can tune the firmware directly. Ashimov has published the files freely, with no commercial barriers between the design and anyone with a printer and an afternoon to spare.

The objects people choose to keep on their desks tend to say something about them. A tiny Macintosh-shaped AI assistant that you built yourself and tuned to your own preferences says rather a lot. It combines a piece of design history, a genuinely capable voice interface, and an honest invitation to understand exactly how the thing works, all in a form that most people will stop and ask about the moment they see it.

The post This 3D-Printed Macintosh Replica Is Actually a Voice AI Assistant first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone Built a Tamagotchi-like Desk Toy That Gets Sad When You Ignore It

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Modern desks overflow with timers, focus apps, and smart assistants that promise more productivity but mostly add more things to manage. There’s a calendar nudging you about meetings, a watch tracking movement, and browser tabs reminding you to hydrate. Not every object on your desk needs to optimize you, though, and sometimes you just want a small, harmless distraction that keeps you company without demanding anything serious in return.

Paul Lagier’s DIY Desk Companion sits next to your laptop as a little creature that lives completely offline. It is not connected to Wi‑Fi, has no app, and never sends notifications. Instead, it runs its own tiny world on a circular screen, reacting to touch, light, and time with shifting eyes and moods. The whole thing exists as a playful break, closer to a desk toy than a productivity gadget.

Designer: Paul Lagier

The companion’s life revolves around three needs, Energy, Fun, and Sleep, visualized as colored arcs around its animated eyes. Energy maps to battery and charging, Fun rises when you interact and falls when ignored, and Sleep depends on light levels, getting drowsy when the room gets dark. These simple meters quietly drive its moods, making it curious, bored, or sleepy depending on how you treat it over the day.

The moods shift over longer stretches, too. Regular interaction makes it age, becoming calmer and more expressive, while neglect can make it sulky or withdrawn. There’s no scoreboard or streak counter, just a sense that this tiny character remembers how you have been treating it. After a while, you catch yourself tapping it to cheer it up during a slump, which is the whole point of having a little desk creature.

A typical day means a few small moments. You tap it during a break, and it perks up, eyes widening. Late at night, when the room gets dark, it slowly drifts off to sleep without you doing anything. When you plug it in the next morning, its Energy bar fills, and its mood lifts. These are quick interactions, a tap or a glance, not mini-games that hijack your break.

Under the shell is a tangle of wires, a microcontroller board, a round color display, touch sensors, a light sensor, and a small battery. Lagier calls it a working prototype rather than a polished product, which feels fitting. The design is simple and neutral, letting the animated face carry the personality while the hardware quietly does its job without needing custom circuitry to make the interaction feel real.

The DIY Desk Companion is proudly unnecessary in the best way. It does not track tasks or nag you about hydration. It just gives you a tiny, responsive presence that makes the space feel less mechanical. Devices around us keep trying to squeeze more output from every minute, so a little offline creature that only wants a tap now and then feels surprisingly refreshing.

The post Someone Built a Tamagotchi-like Desk Toy That Gets Sad When You Ignore It first appeared on Yanko Design.

This DIY AI Astronaut Looks Like a Desk Toy Until You Ask It Questions

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Most DIY AI gadgets are bare boards and wires, or at best a 3D-printed box, and that clashes with the idea of leaving them on a shelf or side table. Even clever builds end up looking like projects rather than finished objects. D. Creative’s tiny AI robot is a counterexample, a chatbot built inside a toy astronaut that looks like decor first and a smart assistant second, making it actually display-worthy.

The basic concept is a small astronaut figurine that you can talk to, which talks back using a cloud LLM. All the electronics, ESP32-S3, mic, amp, speaker, battery, and OLED, are hidden inside the toy shell, so on a desk it reads as a cute space figure until it lights up and answers a question or starts blinking to show it is listening.

Designer: D. Creative

The internals pack tightly. An ESP32-S3 Super Mini acts as the brain, a digital I²S microphone hears you, a matching I²S amplifier and tiny speaker reply, and a 300 mAh battery with a charging board keeps it running. The 0.96-inch OLED is tucked into the helmet as the robot’s face, giving the AI a place to look back from when you address it or ask for help.

The builder gutted a light-up astronaut toy, drilled a few holes for buttons and a USB port, and then packed the new hardware inside before closing it back up. This is not a 3D-printed shell but an existing object repurposed, which keeps the proportions and charm of the original toy while hiding the complexity and making the result feel less like a gadget and more like a character.

The interaction loop is straightforward. You speak, the mic captures your voice, the ESP32 sends it over Wi-Fi to a speech-to-text service and then to the Qwen3 LLM, the response comes back as text, and a text-to-speech engine turns it into audio for the speaker. The astronaut’s OLED changes expression to show when it is listening, thinking, or ready to answer, turning a text exchange into something more animated.

Putting the same kind of chatbot you might use in a browser into a toy astronaut changes the relationship. The presence of a body, a face, and a fixed spot on your desk makes the assistant feel more like a little character you share space with, and less like a disembodied voice that lives somewhere in the cloud and has no opinion on where it sits.

This project hints at a pattern other makers can borrow, taking familiar objects and quietly giving them new capabilities instead of always starting from scratch. A tiny AI astronaut that fits into a home without looking like a project points toward a future where more of our everyday decor hides small, conversational brains, and where the line between toy and tool gets pleasantly blurry, with AI companions that feel more like friends than appliances waiting for commands.

The post This DIY AI Astronaut Looks Like a Desk Toy Until You Ask It Questions first appeared on Yanko Design.