I was super curious about the Reachy Mini, got one and during this weekend me and my 12 years kid put the pieces together, just followed the manual that came with the robot. Very easy to read, clear diagrams and instructions, we just did it really quick.
Finally i plugged it to my Mac Studio M4, downloaded the official app and run the install and the nightmare started, to start it is ironic the product being Made in China and distributed by a Chinese company located, well, in China Mainland but to fully run the app the firewall does not help. Had to use a VPN, I'm used to, I'm designer and programmer, need to dial with this every day, but was a pain to bypass constants random server errors and CloudFlare errors to access Hugging Face. Finally got it download everything.
The app started and Reachy head came up and played the on sound. I was super excited to try the community and the official apps that run inside the main control one, only to find the only main two apps, and looks like the most complete ones following other people experience, require a OpenAI API token, I had to abandon. Tried search Goggle, query Claude and Grok but all pointed to community alternatives that are dead on don't show at all on the list of available apps, both community and official.
The emotions worked, cute.
Cloned the "reachy_mini_conversation_app" repository and modified the calls to point to my local Ollama, TTS and STT services and finally got some more complete interactions. No luck to start the demon using purely the official Python scripts, had to open the full app, keep it running and then run my script that calls my local services.
Next day, I just opened the app to keep playing with it and f**** me, I have a big "Sign in to Hugging Face".
Conclusion, great experience to build it with the kid, horrible and very messy experience with the software.
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