If people haven't listened to the episode of the podcast Acquired about the history of Ikea[1], I strongly recommend it. Fair warning, it's 3.5h long, but the story is fantastic and the hosts do a great job making it engaging.
There is an application for Reachy that makes it so you can connect to Home Assistant, but it's broken and seems abandoned, so I forked it, fixed it, and customized it. That gets you 80% of the way. The rest is based on automations built inside Home Assistant.
And since Reachy's software and SDK are pretty open, it's trivial for a coding agent to learn how to communicate with the robot to achieve your desired outcome.
Yeah, I think this is the right idea (or the most optimistic path towards M-series power/performance). If you wanted something fully/aggressively open you could do something like build a mainboard compatible with one of MNT's fully open SOMs like [1].
A book certainly worth reading for anyone who hasn't. It's interesting to see how little common (modern) project and management pitfalls and tricks have changed in 50 years!
I've enjoyed using a Moto razr+ 2024. If you're interested in trying one check out used devices, their value seems to crater. I think I got mine for ~$300 last year on eBay (while it was still the current gen device)
Same. It's very handy to be able to ask for one-off tools for things that I _could_ try to figure out, but probably wouldn't be worth the time. My favorite example so far was a Python script to help debug communication between a microcontroller and a motor driver. I was able to dump the entire datasheet PDF for the driver into Gemini and ask it for a Python CLI to decode communication traffic, and 30 seconds later it was done. Fantastic bang/buck ratio!
Interesting, I'm fairly new to using these tools and am starting with Claude Code but at the $20 level. Do you have any advice for when I would benefit from stepping up to $100? I'm not sure what gets better (besides higher usage limits).
No clue as i've not used Claude Code on Pro to get an idea of usage limits. But, if you get value out of Claude Code and ever run into limits, Max is quite generous for Sonnet imo. I have zero concern about Sonnet usage atm, so it's definitely valuable there.
Usage for Opus is my only "complaint", but i've used it so little i don't even know if it's that much better than Sonnet. As it is, even with more generous Opus limits i'd probably want a more advanced Claude Code behavior - where it uses Opus to plan and orchestrate, and Sonnet would do the grunt work for cheaper tokens. But i'm not aware of that as a feature atm.
Regardless, i'm quite pleased with Claude Code on $100 Max. If it was a bit smarter i might even upgrade to $200, but atm it's too dumb to give it more autonomy and that's what i'd need for $200. Opus might be good enough there, but $100 Opus limits are so low i've not even gotten enough experience with it to know if it's good enough for $200
I recently switched from Pro to $100 Max, and the only difference I've found so far is higher usage limits.
Antropic tends to give shiny new features to Max users first, but as of now, there is nothing Max-only.
For me, it's a good deal nonetheless, as even $100 Max limits are huge.
While on Pro, I hit the limits each day that I used Claude Code. Now I rarely see the warning, but I never actually hit the limit.
[1] https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/ikea