icarus.
a small flying robot with a face, a voice, and a personality.
icarus is a small flying robot that's also, somehow, a character. he has a face ,a round display showing animated eyes that follow you, narrow when focused, glow warmer when proud. he has a voice — he can hear you and talk back, with a personality leaning grand and slightly dramatic. and he has wings, eventually, with the ambition that comes with them.
he's named after the boy from the myth , the one who flew too close to the sun. in the myth, that's a cautionary tale. for me it's a feature. icarus is a robot defined by *wanting more than he can do*, and figuring out how to do more anyway.
named after a boy who flew too close to the sun.
what he does
icarus is built around a few core capabilities, all running together to give the impression of an actual creature rather than a remote-controlled gadget:
- expression a round color display showing animated eyes — focused, scanning, sleepy, proud, alarmed. always-on, even mid-flight.
- voice conversational AI through a hybrid pipeline — local wake/reflexes on his MCU, heavier reasoning on a desktop companion app over wifi.
- vision a MIPI CSI camera feeding an STM32N6 with onboard NPU — face detection, object recognition, eventual visual SLAM.
- motion expressive servos for posture and gesture in early versions; brushless motors and a flight controller stack for the eventual flying form.
- touch capacitive touch on the face — poke him, he reacts. pet him, he calms down. on-the-table interactions matter as much as the flying ones.
the plan
building a flying robot with personality from scratch is the kind of project that usually fails because too many things have to work at once. so icarus comes in three deliberate versions, each isolating one new class of risk:
- v1 the puppet
stationary form on a desk. validates the entire software stack — face animation, voice pipeline, personality engine, sensor handling, wifi to companion app. nucleo dev board + breakout shields. no flight, no custom PCB, just the brain of icarus learning who he is.
- v2 the walker
walking chassis built around a custom STM32N6 carrier board. validates the production hardware on a platform that can't fall out of the sky. all v1 software ports forward; the only new thing is the PCB and locomotion.
- v3 the flyer
same custom board, same firmware, now in a drone airframe. flight controller stack added. by the time we get here, only the airframe and motors are new — everything else has been proven on the ground.
where i am right now
v1 hardware is on the way. nucleo H563 dev board pulled from work, servos and supporting parts ordered, custom dev environment set up. firmware foundation work begins as soon as parts arrive — first goal is just lighting an LED on the H563 and turning a single servo with a PWM signal. unglamorous, but it's the foundation everything else sits on.
everything past that is in design and documentation phase. system block diagrams locked in. component-level decisions (display, audio amp, mic, IMU) made. the work now is firmware, then assembly, then iteration.
build log
build log entries coming soon. each one will be a dated post documenting a specific decision, problem, or milestone — the failures, the workarounds, the parts that didn't work the first time.
