What is it?

The Kawaii (Cute in Japanese) is a useless robot that features a 512 pixel dot matrix LED display and two stepper motors that can move around by itself. It also got two separated servo motors for pushing the lid open and switching off the power switch.

The robot is powered by a ESP32 module with mobile control interface. You can easily add more facial expression into the robot by adding the binary frame buffers generated from the online gesture generator into the SD card.

All design files are open source on this Github Repo

Technical Specification

Programming Notes

You will need to install ESP32 board manager for your Arduino IDE. Details for required library and version are written in the firmware comment section.

Why did you make it?

Because it is cute :D

What makes it special?

This should be one of the most high-tech useless machine you can find on the internet. With a build time of around 1 per 3 weeks, I am not planning to make any more which makes it really rare and worth collection!

Buyer Notes

• This robot can be powered by 2 x 523450 1000mAh LiPo as well as powered externally via USB type C. Due to shipping limitation, battery are not included. You can easily find suitable one on Aliexpress or other online electronic sites.
• As the robot is handcrafted, there will be some imperfection like scratches or glue residues. However, these imperfection will not effect the robot operation and the robot will be tested before shipping.
• On this particular unit, there are minor scratches on the back panel (which make this unit slightly cheaper than others I sold)
• You will need to prepare your own micro SD card with SPI supported. Recommend using a SD card from 512MB to 2GB capacity and formatted as FAT (FAT16) for better compatibility.
• The SD card contents can be found on the Github repo. Copy everything under the "sd_card" folder into the SD card and insert it to the SD card slot of the robot before starting the robot.