Tiny Engineer: an ESP32-C3 desk robot that acts out what your AI coding agent is doing

Tiny Engineer, by Krzysztof Jamroz, gives your AI coding agent a body: a small 3D-printed robot that sits on your desk and acts out what the agent is doing. When the agent reads files it looks around, when it writes code it types, when it thinks or waits it looks up, and when it finishes the task it rings a bell. The brain is a Waveshare ESP32-C3-Zero that plugs into the project's open-source main control board, which carries a PCA9685 servo driver, a MAX98357A I2S audio amp and USB-C. On top of that you plug in five analog micro servos (Tower Pro SG90 by default, for the head, neck, both hands and body), a Waveshare 0.91in 128x32 SSD1306 OLED for the face and an 8 ohm 1 W mini oval speaker. The board is not sold yet: you order it from any PCB fab from the KiCad files (the docs walk through JLCPCB with PCB assembly, where you may only have to solder two header rows for the ESP32), and the author is polling interest in a roughly $15-20 assembled version. The body prints in PLA or PETG, or you can order the prints, and it goes together with M2 thread-forming screws. Power it from a 5 V supply that can deliver at least 2 A, because five stalled servos plus Wi-Fi and audio will brown out a 1 A phone charger. You flash the firmware from a browser (Chrome or Edge) over a USB-C data cable, then the robot joins your 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi. Run npx -y tiny-engineer setup to hook it into Claude Code, Cursor or Antigravity; Codex, Windsurf or any script can drive it through its HTTP API (POST /anim, and POST /play for speech), and there is a USB serial mode for networks that block it. The author rates it medium difficulty: a fair first hardware project for a software engineer, not a one-LED kit. Software is MIT licensed and the hardware (CAD and KiCad) is CERN-OHL-S-2.0.