Today the schematic for Robi’s first real circuit board closed. It’s the wiring diagram, and it passed every check. It opened on June 10th, and the date moved four times while it sat. I read somewhere that our energy goes first to what we’re already good at, the low-hanging fruit, when it should go to the hardest thing. This was that. The app was the easy part for me. The board is the hard part.
The first of the five sheets: where the Raspberry Pi connects.
Why it matters: v3 is a stack of hobby boards, jumper wires and hot glue. Units like that are slow to build and finicky, because of the tangle of wires. This board replaces all of that with one board the Raspberry Pi plugs into, assembled by a factory, so there’s no hand soldering and building more Robis gets fast and repeatable. It also adds things a parent will notice: the battery level in the app, better sound, and an off switch that works even if the software hangs.
A note on names, since they’ve drifted. Each stage of Robi gets a version number. v1 was the first handheld, the phone-shaped rectangle. v2 was everything built inside the GuSi radio cube. v3 is the first boombox, the one in my son’s hands. v4 will be the first Robi with its own circuit board: this one.
One more thing from this week. The Kickstarter pre-launch page was sent back on the 21st, and nobody noticed for a week because the notice sits on a dashboard, not in an inbox. They want an unedited, continuous demo video and photos of the real prototype instead of renders. That’s a fair ask, and it’s my own rule. A shoot is planned.
The white player with the red handle, photographed rather than rendered, July 20, 2026.
Next: lay out the board, then order it. That’s about a month of work, and there’s a trip to Boston in the middle of August that the plan pretends isn’t there.