Image: reddit.com · daijin: an ESP32-S3 voice companion with Claude as the brain. It feeds my cat and pops a water balloon in a park.
Daijin, an ESP32 voice companion with Claude Code as its brain
An ESP32-S3 voice companion sends speech over MQTT to a Mac where Claude Code decides what to do and runs tools, such as a cat treat dispenser.
Credits
- Reddit poster TravelDizzy3660 Source ↗
Earliest dated source:
The full story
Daijin is a push-to-talk voice companion built on an ESP32-S3 with a microphone, amplifier and small OLED face. Audio goes over MQTT to the maker's Mac, where whisper.cpp transcribes it, Claude Code decides what to do and runs shell tools, and ElevenLabs speaks the reply. Other ESP32 nodes act as its "hands", including a treat dispenser for their cat and a servo that pops a water balloon.
Most of the ESP32 work was the audio path: a distant broker meant raw audio was too slow, so they compressed it, and several I2S, Wi-Fi and MQTT settings had to be fixed. They are honest that a round trip takes 6 to 22 seconds and that every scene in the video is staged.
How it was done
Tools
Themes
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Sources
From a short post by the maker, so the details are as they tell them.
- Reddit: daijin: an ESP32-S3 voice companion with Claude as the brain. It feeds my cat and pops a water balloReddit poster: TravelDizzy3660Posted
The maker's post on r/esp32.
If it disappears: archived copy of Reddit: daijin: an ESP32-S3 voice companion with Claude as the brain. It feeds my cat and pops a water ballo (opens in a new tab)
- The video: youtube.com
Linked in the post.