wire-pod

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The Vector robot was created in 2018 by a company called Anki.

It was created to be an always-on companion. It would do useful things, like set timers and answer questions.

It's main purpose, though, is to be an animated character brought into the real world.

The character, animations, and sounds were created by professional artists from the likes of Pixar.

Vector sold well, but the company went defunct in May of 2019.

While most of Vector's functions are local, voice commands and onboarding require a cloud server.

This left the community concerned about his future.

The assets were acquired by a company called Digtal Dream Labs. They promised to keep the servers up.

They also promised to create a local server solution: and they did! It is called Escape Pod.

However, it cost too much money, and did not perform anywhere near as well as the cloud.

By dissassembling the software, and by using some open source components. I was able to create custom server software.

It is open-source, very customizable, and can work with any Vector with no payment to DDL.

As of August 2023, the servers are down and have been down for a while. The future of Digital Dream Labs is uncertain.

wire-pod allows robots to be set up after a factory reset, and retains all of the functionality the cloud provided.

It is designed to be easy to setup on any Linux machine, like a Raspberry Pi (4B).

It is available on Github: wire-pod