Check on the dog
It goes and finds the animal rather than waiting for the animal to walk past a fixed camera. Then it plays with them, which is the part a camera can never do.
CAMERADRIVELASER POINTER
● OPEN SOURCE · BUILT IN PUBLIC
ORBIE
A home robot that outlives us.
Jibo. Vector. Astro. None of them failed because the hardware was bad — they failed because the company did, and each was built so that when the servers went off, the robot on the shelf became an ornament.
Orbie is built so that cannot happen. The CAD, the firmware and the failures are public. Three hardware generations and ten units built by hand, in the open.
3
hardware generations
10
V2 units built by hand
1,299
messages in the build log
355
photographs, dated
6
people
$0
subscription, ever
// 01 — WHAT IT IS FOR
It goes to the room. That is the whole idea.
A camera bolted to a wall waits for something to walk past it. A robot that can cross a room can go and look — and once it is there, it can also play, speak, and take a temperature.
Look in on a sleeping child
A quiet pass through the room, a still frame, a skin temperature without a thermometer in an ear. No subscription, and the footage goes wherever you decide it goes.
CAMERATEMPERATUREDRIVE
Remind a parent about medication
It comes to the room and says the thing out loud, at the time, in a voice — which lands differently from a phone alert in another room.
DRIVESPEAKEREYES
Walk the house before bed
A route through the rooms, a photo from each, the back door checked. A patrol is just a list of waypoints and a camera.
DRIVECAMERADISTANCE
Sit on the desk and keep you company
Most of the time it is not doing a job. It has a face, it looks at what it hears, and it reacts. That is the feature people actually keep.
EYESMICROPHONENECK
Be the thing you take apart
Ten units were built by hand with, in the words of the person who built them, "a lot of tape, glue, and adhesives". It was always meant to be opened.
COMPUTEPOWER
// 02 — THE BODY
Eleven parts. Every one of them documented.
A spec sheet tells you what is inside. This one also tells you what each part lets you do — because that is the number that matters when the wiring diagram is public.
V3 — ELEVEN SUBSYSTEMS · TAP A POINT
Camera
OV3660 moduleSCCB 0x3c · auto-detected
Mounted in the head above the display, so where it points and where the robot appears to be looking are the same direction. Streams MJPEG on port 81 and serves a single still on /capture.
WHAT IT OPENS UP
This is the sensor everything interesting hangs off. Any vision model you can reach over HTTP — local or hosted — can drive the robot from one still frame. The capture endpoint exists precisely so you do not have to touch the firmware.
// 03 — WHAT YOU COULD BUILD
A camera, a laser, a thermometer and wheels, with nothing locked.
Most “open” robots open the software and keep the machine shut. Publish the CAD and the PCB alongside the firmware and the project stops being a product with a plugin system — you can change the body, not just the behaviour.
Most of what follows is a few lines against the HTTP interface. The ones marked “a term project” are where you would open the CAD or the firmware instead.
FILTER BY PART
Scheduled cat entertainment
AN AFTERNOONLaser routine that runs at 3pm while the house is empty, driving to a different room each day.
LASER POINTERDRIVE
Fever check
AN AFTERNOONInfrared reading paired to a photo and a timestamp, logged wherever you keep records.
TEMPERATURECAMERA
Bring your own model
AN AFTERNOONPoint /capture at any vision model and let it decide what the robot does next. No firmware changes.
CAMERACOMPUTE
Plant round
A WEEKENDA route past every pot, a photo of each, drooping leaves flagged before anyone notices.
DRIVECAMERA
Table-edge safety
A WEEKENDTime-of-flight pointed down instead of forward, so it stops at a cliff. A patch everyone benefits from.
DISTANCE
A face nobody drew yet
A WEEKENDExpressions are bitmaps. Draw a set, open a pull request, watch it ship to other people’s robots.
EYES
Follow me
A WEEKENDPerson detection on the camera, distance held by the time-of-flight, gait handled by the wheels.
CAMERADISTANCEDRIVE
Language tutor on wheels
A WEEKENDMic in, hosted model, speaker out — a conversation partner that follows you around the kitchen.
MICROPHONESPEAKERDRIVE
Night watch
A WEEKENDMotion route after midnight, a frame to your phone only when something changed.
DRIVECAMERADISTANCE
A different body
A TERM PROJECTThe CAD is published under a licence that lets you fabricate it. Print a new shell, mount a new sensor.
NECKPOWER
Swarm of one house
A TERM PROJECTTwo units, one map, rooms divided between them. Nothing in the firmware assumes it is alone.
DRIVECOMPUTE
Teach it a trick
A TERM PROJECTRecord a joystick sequence, name it, trigger it by voice. The recorded macro is the primitive everything else builds on.
MICROPHONEDRIVENECK
Radiator audit
A WEEKENDA cold morning, a route through the house, an infrared reading off every radiator. Find the one that never warms up.
TEMPERATUREDRIVECAMERA
A laser that knows where the cat is
A WEEKENDOnly fire when the camera can see the animal, and stop when it stops caring. Better than a loop, and kinder.
LASER POINTERCAMERA
Dot on demand
A WEEKENDTap anywhere in the camera view and the head turns until the laser lands there. Aiming is a neck problem, not a driving one.
LASER POINTERNECK
Coffee is ready
AN AFTERNOONPoint the thermometer at the mug and say so out loud when it crosses drinkable. Trivial, and you would use it every day.
TEMPERATURESPEAKER
Eyes that listen
AN AFTERNOONA volume meter with a face — the display reacts to how loud the room is. The cheapest possible way to make it feel present.
EYESMICROPHONE
Night light with manners
AN AFTERNOONThe eyes hold a dim glow and brighten only when the time-of-flight sees someone walk past. No app, no switch.
EYESDISTANCE
Read it out loud
A WEEKENDHold a page up to the camera, get it back through the speaker. Text recognition is somebody else’s API and this is the body for it.
CAMERASPEAKER
Patrol that makes it home
A TERM PROJECTRoute planning that watches the cell emberage and turns back while it still can. Unglamorous, and the difference between a demo and a device.
POWERDRIVECOMPUTE
None of these are on a roadmap and none of them are promised. They are the obvious things eleven parts and a published wiring diagram make possible — written down so it is clear how low the floor is. The unobvious ones are the reason to open the hardware at all.
// 04 — THREE GENERATIONS
Built three times, in the open, since July 2025.
V1Jul – Sep 2025
The ball
A replication of the open-source ESP-ROLL ball bot, built to learn what would and would not work: an ESP32 camera in a transparent sphere, driven by two wheels, with the battery slung underneath as the ballast that makes it roll. Two weeks was the estimate.
V2Sep 2025 – Jan 2026
Ten units
Our own rolling design, built ten times over so there was something to hand people. Still transparent, still nothing hidden. The first one was assembled with tape and glue.
V3Nov 2025 – now
The companion
A complete rethink. Two wheels, a tilting head, a custom dot-matrix face. It stopped being a ball and started being someone.
// 05 — WHAT OPEN MEANS HERE
Public on GitHub is not the same as open source.
Without a licence file, default copyright applies and nobody may legally use, modify or redistribute anything. Every one of these repositories sat in exactly that state until 5 September 2026, while the README claimed otherwise. The licences below are now committed, and you can check them rather than take our word.
Reciprocity on the hardware is the part that matters. Under a permissive licence a larger manufacturer could take the CAD, close it, and ship it while contributing nothing back — using the only advantage this project has against it.
CREDIT WHERE IT IS OWED
V1 is a replication of ESP-ROLL by Max Imagination, published under CC BY-NC-SA, which also credits s60sc for the ESP32-CAM firmware. That project is the reason this one started. It is quarantined as reference-only until a lawyer has read the relationship properly.
- Firmware, application code, toolingApache-2.0
Carries an explicit patent grant. MIT is silent on patents, and this is robotics.
◆ IN THE REPOSITORY
- CAD, PCB, mechanical designCERN-OHL-S-2.0
Strongly reciprocal — a modified design has to stay open. A permissive hardware licence would let a larger manufacturer close a fork.
◆ IN THE REPOSITORY
- Documentation, photographs, videoCC BY-SA 4.0
The build record is part of the project, and it should travel under the same terms.
◆ IN THE REPOSITORY
- V1 — the ESP-ROLL replicationReference only
Derives from Max Imagination’s ESP-ROLL under CC BY-NC-SA: non-commercial, share-alike. Credited, not relicensed, not for commercial use until a lawyer has read it.
◇ QUARANTINED — REFERENCE ONLY
// 06 — WHO IS BEHIND IT
Ayva Labs sponsors Orbie. It does not own it.
Sponsorship means Ayva funds development and staff time, and manufactures and sells assembled units. That arrangement paid for three hardware generations, and it is worth saying plainly rather than obscuring.
Making that real rather than asserted takes three things. The repositories live under the project’s own account, not an Ayva one — done. Governance sets out what Ayva does not get: no casting vote on technical decisions, no ability to close the design, no gatekeeping on forks — done. Copyright sits with Ayva by default, because Ayva paid for the work, and moving it to contributors is a legal step nobody has taken yet — not done, and the licence notices say so.
There is nothing to buy on this site, and nothing to sign up for. When there is something to say about how continued development gets funded, it will be said here in full and in advance — not on a countdown.
THE SIX PEOPLE WHO BUILT IT
- Ashok Jaiswal
- Prithu Hazarika
- Lalith Kumar
- Sumit Dandekar
- Ameya Mistry
- Ajay
Every photograph, quotation and part number on this page came out of their group chat and their CAD files.
// 07 — FOLLOW THE BUILD
The next generation gets built in public too.
THE BUILD IS POSTED AS IT HAPPENS
@orbie_robot
Firmware that did not compile, parts that arrived wrong, the display the day it finally lit. If you would rather watch than read, this is where it goes first.
// 08 — A NOTE FROM ASHOK
I am a software engineer who kept ending up in hardware: a media centre funded on Indiegogo, a yogurt machine that COVID killed, an AI toy for children that I patented and licensed. Friends with kids kept asking for the same thing for their pets.
Orbie is my first robot. In a year or two I want it in 10,000 homes, learning what the dog did to it. Then 100,000.
— ASHOK JAISWAL · HONG KONG
// 09 — FAQ
The questions we get asked.
- Can I buy one?
- Not yet. Orbie is still a prototype. The files to build one are public now; assembled units come later.
- Does it need the internet?
- No. It runs on your home Wi-Fi and serves its own web page. The internet only matters if you point it at an AI model that lives online.
- Where does the footage go?
- Nowhere, unless you send it somewhere. Frames leave the robot only when you or your software ask for them. There is no Orbie cloud.
- What if Ayva Labs shuts down?
- The robot keeps working. It never depended on a server, and the CAD, firmware and documentation stay public under open licences.