Jas gave me exactly one look when she saw what I was unboxing beside the fire.
I knew you’d start building that tonight.
She was right. We were two days into a Yorkshire cabin escape (off-grid, no phone signal worth speaking of, a three-month-old just down for the night) and there I sat, instructions spread across the dining table, building a small robot while the owls called outside.
What Reachy Mini is
Reachy Mini is an open-source robot from Pollen Robotics, now part of the Hugging Face ecosystem. It is small enough to sit on a desk, expressive enough to feel alive, and open enough that the community is already publishing behaviours, integrations, and model checkpoints for it.
The idea is straightforward: a physical platform that runs the same Python and model stack you would use in any AI project, embodied in something that can move, respond, and react in the real world.
The build
The instructions were impeccably clear, closer to LEGO than anything I expected from a robotics kit. Everything was labelled, the steps were short, and the assembly made the engineering legible. You understand what you are building because the build teaches you.
This post is still being written
I am working on the full write-up, covering the build, first boot, and where I want to take it next. Check back soon.
Further reading
- Reachy Mini by Pollen Robotics
- Hugging Face Robotics
- The full Yorkshire trip where I built this: Fells, forests and family