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.