Reachy-Mini

Back to Part 1 — Reachy Mini Arrives in Aotearoa Sometimes a robot just refuses to cooperate. After spending seven months waiting for my Reachy Mini to arrive, I assembled it with care — and then watched it refuse to boot. Power LED: green. ACT LED: one sad blink, then nothing. No WiFi hotspot. USB-C ignored. The motors twitched promisingly, but that was it. My little desk robot was alive enough to taunt me, but too broken to respond. ...

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. ...