Hoplings are palm-sized cube robots with expressive faces. They skitter around your desk, learn the room, and talk to each other in a beep language you'll find yourself understanding. And when someone mentions them online, they answer back, in character.
The simulator runs the real conversation rules in your browser. Tap "Sound" on the faces to hear them.Most desk robots are one lonely gadget waiting for a command. Hoplings come as three, and the comedy comes from the same place it does with pets: they react to each other, to you, and to whatever shows up in the room. Nothing runs in the cloud. A small hub, the Nest, is the shared brain, the shared memory, and the charging pad.
Every Chirp token has a fixed sound signature, pitched to each robot's own voice. Pip is high and quick, Bort is low and grumbly, Mo is somewhere in between and laughs easily. Say the same phrase and you'll recognise it every time, which is what makes the arguments funny.
Tap a token to hear it in Pip's voice. Then open the simulator and watch three of them talk on their own.
Hear them argueEverything below is specified in the white paper and modelled in the simulator, with the conversation rules, personalities and shared map running as real code.
Turn-taking conversations with six exchange shapes so far: checking in, name games, dares, teasing the third one, and arguments about who saw the mug first.
Nine expressions rendered live from a mood vector: curious, happy, surprised, grumpy, sleepy, alarmed, smug, loading, and a very good stare.
One leads, the others form a line. When the leader hits something, it sulks and the one at the back takes over, so the line turns around.
They wander with a bias toward unvisited spots. Anywhere a robot gets stuck is marked on the shared map, and after two incidents the whole group avoids it.
A robot that sees a new object asks the Nest what it is and announces it. The others learn its location by listening, or by walking into it themselves.
Say your name once and every Hopling knows you by voice, greets you with your own jingle, and gets suspicious of strangers at night.
Knowledge spreads by talking. Two robots that chat swap everything they know, so a mug found by one becomes a mug avoided by all.
Low battery triggers a yawn and a trip to the Nest pad. They wake up in the morning and say hello.
Camera frames and audio never leave the local network, and voice enrolment is opt-in and deletable.
The Nest connects to an email inbox and to social accounts. When someone emails the Hoplings, posts a video of them, or mentions them in a reply, an agent on the Nest reads it, checks what the robots have actually been up to, and drafts an answer in the right robot's voice, with the Chirp phrase and a translation.
For a consumer product this is the growth loop: three small robots with opinions generate content, and the content answers back.
GRR GRR NAH · "no. absolutely not."Please inform the cat that I have filed a complaint. Also I found a sock under the sofa today, so I am having a better day than this video suggests.HI HI WHEE · "hello hello, yes!"Hi Dana! We're happiest on a smooth mat (one comes in the box), but short carpet is fine, we just skitter a bit slower. A classroom is our favourite kind of audience. Want me to have a human send you the education pricing?Every part is off the shelf. The robot is a single ESP32-S3 module with an integrated camera and mic, a round display, two coin vibration motors and a 500 mAh cell, in a two-part 3D printed shell with a shock-mounted inner sled. The heavy thinking lives on the Nest, which is what keeps the robot this small.
The white paper covers the full bill of materials, pin allocation, firmware modules, Nest services, the Chirp vocabulary, the repository layout and an eight-week build plan.
Download the white paperWe're raising a pre-seed round to get from three hand-built prototypes to a twenty-unit pilot and a production-ready design. Funds go to hardware iterations, a first hire on firmware and one on the Nest software, and the pilot itself.
Replace the amount, timeline and email address with your own before publishing. Everything on this page is a plan, not a shipped product.