There are two kinds of tech excitement.
The day you order something…
and the day it finally arrives.
Between those two moments lives a strange ritual: refreshing tracking pages, checking emails, and convincing yourself the package has definitely moved since the last refresh.
My Reachy Mini robot took seven months to travel from idea to desk.
This post is Part 1 of a multipart story.
Reachy Mini Diaries — The Kiwi Robotics Journey
- Part 1 — Waiting, Arrival, Assembly (this post)
- Part 2 — Debugging the Robot
- Part 3 — First Impressions
- Part 4 onwards — Building Things With Reachy
The Order (July 2025 Optimism)
In July 2025 I ordered a Reachy Mini, a small open-source desk robot created by Pollen Robotics in collaboration with Hugging Face.
The announcement blog immediately caught my attention:
https://huggingface.co/blog/reachy-mini
Reachy Mini sits in an interesting space between robotics and AI. Pollen Robotics brings the mechanical design and robotics expertise, while Hugging Face connects it to a large open AI ecosystem where developers can share and run robot behaviours and applications.
The idea behind the robot is simple but exciting — an approachable platform for experimenting with AI, human-robot interaction, and creative coding. Small enough to sit on a desk, but open enough to build interesting things with.
The plan formed quickly.
Order in July.
Receive it around December.
Spend part of the Christmas break exploring robotics.
A robot, a few days off, and some curiosity felt like a perfect holiday project.
There was just one small complication.
New Zealand wasn’t actually listed in the delivery countries.
So I reached out to the team on their Discord community and asked whether shipping to NZ might be possible.
Their response was refreshingly relaxed:
“Sure, why not.”
And just like that, the order went through.
As far as I know, this became the first Reachy Mini order shipped to New Zealand. A small but satisfying Kiwi robotics moment.
The Waiting Phase
When you order interesting hardware, waiting becomes a routine.
You check emails.
You check Discord updates.
You refresh shipping dashboards.
Then you refresh them again just to be sure.
For several months the robot mostly lived in my imagination.
The Christmas Plan (That Didn’t Happen)
December arrived.
The robot didn’t.
At first that felt fairly normal — hardware timelines move around.
After a while I checked in with the team to see what was happening.
The answer was honest and familiar to anyone who has followed hardware projects:
Supply chain issues.
Shipping was also being prioritised based on ease of dispatch to different regions. Some places were simply faster to deliver to.
New Zealand, it turns out, wasn’t the easiest destination.
Fair enough.
Global logistics is complicated.
Though for a brief moment I did wonder if DHL could reach the moon before it reached my desk.
February 2026: The Robot Lands
Then one day in February 2026 the message arrived.
Your package has shipped.
Suddenly all those tracking refreshes felt justified.
The journey from warehouse to Wellington was watched closely. Possibly a little too closely.
Eventually the box arrived, and inside it was something I had been waiting months to explore — my own small desk robot.
Time to build.
The Assembly (and the Photo Problem)
The original plan was to document the whole build.
That plan lasted about five minutes.
The excitement of assembling the robot took over, and before long parts were clicking into place faster than photos were being taken.
By the time I remembered the camera, Reachy was already most of the way assembled.
So the photos I have are mostly from the near-complete stages of the build.
Even in those late stages it was fun watching the robot slowly come together.
Head.
Body.
Arms.
Piece by piece the small robot that had spent seven months travelling through manufacturing and logistics systems was finally sitting on my desk.
Ready to come alive.
The Moment of Truth
Assembly complete.
Power connected.
Time to turn it on.
And… it didn’t quite work.
Well, technically something worked. But not enough to actually use the robot properly.
That moment turned out to be the real beginning of this journey.
Debugging hardware and software together is a special kind of adventure, and Reachy decided my first lesson in robotics would start immediately.
Next in the series
➡ Part 2 — Debugging Reachy Mini
Firmware surprises, setup puzzles, and the process of convincing a brand new desk robot to cooperate.
Written for KiwiGPT.co.nz — Generated, Published and Tinkered with AI by a Kiwi