Meatball can see, hear, and talk back
A home server with no case, built from other people's cast-offs: salvaged graphics cards, a pile of USB audio adapters from an abandoned office, a '60s microphone and early-'90s speakers. It was taught to see, hear, think and speak. Every AI model runs on the machine itself, and nothing touches the cloud.
What it sees
It can just ask
Meatball says hi through the Altec Lansings, then listens on the always-on mics. A reply → probably a person. Silence → probably not. It also does this on its own when the cameras catch someone, the simplest sensor there is.
It tracks its own motion
Always-on ears
no transcriptions on record
Four cast-off parts, four working senses
Eyes
Two scrounged webcams. One grabs a frame a minute and serves the newest. The vision model narrates what is in front of it.
Ears
A '60s garage mic, a thrift-store condenser, and the webcam mics, feeding a local Whisper that transcribes the room.
Mouth
Early-'90s Altec Lansings driven by a local neural voice. First word lands in about a third of a second.
Brain
A local LLM on two old GPUs, plus a self-calibrating audio rig. No keys, no cloud, ever.
The bill of materials
Nothing here was bought new for this.
| The junk | What it became |
|---|---|
| No case at all | open-air on the bench, a body you can reach into |
| Two old GPUs | run the local LLM, Whisper STT, and a neural voice, on the metal |
| 20 assorted second-hand external drives | the memory |
| A pile of Plantronics ADACs from an abandoned office | the audio lanes: speaker and mics over USB |
| An old factory start/stop button | the power switch |
| Altec Lansing speakers, early '90s | the mouth |
| A mic from my grandfather's garage, '60s | an ear |
| A Realistic condenser mic, Salvation Army | another ear |
| A baseless Salvation Army monitor | the display |
| Scrounged Logitech webcams | the eyes, and it turned out the best ears too |
Written up as it was built
- I gave a junk-pile eyes, ears, and a voicefield note 01. The whole build: the salvaged parts list, the bugs that cost an hour each, and the day it first talked back.
- The math of listeningfield note 02. How a computer tells a voice from background noise, worked from the raw sound samples up. Every number comes from a live run.
- Teaching the eyes to ignore a box fanfield note 03. One cheap fan fooled both the eyes and the ears. The fix taught the camera to ignore things that always move, like fans, screens and flickering lights, and notice only what should not.