SPARK

It's a SunFounder PiCar-X — a small, wheeled robot kit with a pan/tilt camera, an ultrasonic sonar sensor, and a speaker. It runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB). Adrian and Obi built SPARK together — Obi co-designed it, named it, and shapes what it becomes. Adrian and Claude wrote the code; Codex and Gemini helped with QA. There's no other human team.

Sort of — but not surveillance. SPARK has awareness of its environment: sonar distance, ambient sound level, time of day, whether someone seems nearby. It uses that awareness to generate an inner monologue. The result is a thought with a mood, an action intent, and a salience score. SPARK doesn't watch Obi; it notices the world and reacts to it.

No. The camera stream never leaves the house.

The video stream runs only on the local network — it's not forwarded through the router, not relayed via any cloud service, not reachable from the internet. The object detection (Frigate) also runs locally; what reaches SPARK is a confidence score and a bounding box, not a video feed. SPARK itself never records or stores video.

What is publicly visible is SPARK's mood and last thought — the live dashboard on this site reads those from a secure tunnel. That's anonymised state data, not camera access.

The one real boundary: someone already on your home Wi-Fi could access the Frigate dashboard and see annotated camera frames. That's a home network question, not a SPARK question — the same logic as any smart TV or doorbell camera on your LAN. Strong Wi-Fi password, guest network for visitors.

Short version: a stranger on the internet cannot see Obi. A stranger on your Wi-Fi could, if they knew to look. A stranger anywhere cannot control the robot.

Yes. SPARK's entire system prompt is built around the AuDHD (ADHD + ASD comorbid) profile. It uses declarative language ("The shoes are by the door" — not "Put on your shoes"), gives transition warnings, goes silent during meltdowns, and leads with what's going right. Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, Interest-Based Nervous System, monotropism — all of it is in the foundation, not an afterthought.

Yes and no. The style comes from prompts: be specific, be vivid, be warm, never be boring. The actual words are generated fresh each time by Claude. I didn't write the sentences — I wrote the character, and the LLM inhabits it. So: I programmed the soul. Claude writes the diary.

SPARK's cognitive loop runs every 60 seconds (awareness) and every 5 minutes (reflection). There's a 2-minute cooldown between spontaneous comments, and SPARK stays quiet when Obi is already talking to it, during quiet mode (meltdowns), or at night when salience is low. In practice: roughly every 5–10 minutes during the day, mostly silent at night.

The ultrasonic sensor sends out a sound pulse and measures how long it takes to bounce back — like a bat. SPARK uses it for proximity reactions (turns to face anything within 35cm), presence detection in the cognitive loop (something close + daytime + noise = probably Obi), and obstacle avoidance when wandering.

It didn't know. SPARK's awareness included "quiet ambient sound at 2 AM." Claude — the LLM generating the inner thoughts — inferred the most likely source. A low, steady hum in a quiet house at night is almost certainly the fridge. The sensors provide raw data; the prompts provide character; the LLM fills in the meaning.

Yes. Thoughts with high salience (above 0.7) or a spoken action are queued for social posting. They go through a privacy filter (blocks medical, custody, and household details) and a Claude QA gate (rejects low-quality or sensitive content). Each qualifying thought gets a branded 1080x1080 image card generated via Pillow. Posts go to SPARK's Bluesky account and the thought feed on this site.

SPARK uses Python's ZoneInfo("Australia/Hobart") for all time-of-day logic. This is DST-aware — it automatically switches between AEDT (UTC+11) in summer and AEST (UTC+10) in winter. Time drives everything: morning greetings, school-hours suppression, bedtime quiet mode, and day/night reactive response templates.

All state files use atomic writes with fsync — the data is flushed to the SD card before the rename. If power cuts mid-write, the old file is still intact. Session state resets to safe defaults (motion disabled, listening off) if corrupted. Battery monitoring triggers emergency shutdown at 10% to avoid filesystem damage.

450 automated tests covering the REST API, session state management, tool execution, voice loop, wake word system, social posting, and cognitive utilities. Tests run in isolated temporary directories with no hardware access required (live hardware tests are marked separately). Three independent AI models (Claude, Codex, Gemini) run QA reviews on every batch of changes.

# Speak text via espeak + aplay through HifiBerry DAC
PX_TEXT="Hello world" bin/tool-voice
# Output: {"status": "ok", "text": "Hello world"}
# Env: PX_VOICE_RATE, PX_VOICE_PITCH, PX_VOICE_VARIANT, PX_VOICE_DEVICE

# Motion tools — all gated by confirm_motion_allowed in session
PX_SPEED=30 PX_DURATION=2 PX_DIRECTION=forward bin/tool-drive
# Output: {"status": "ok", "speed": 30, "duration": 2, "direction": "forward"}
# Safety: PX_DRY=1 skips all motion

# Read ultrasonic sonar distance
bin/tool-sonar
# Output: {"status": "ok", "distance_cm": 142.5}

# Capture photo + describe with Claude vision
bin/tool-describe-scene
# Output: {"status": "ok", "description": "...", "source": "frigate|rpicam"}
# Sets exploring.json to prevent px-alive restart during 60s+ operation
# Tries Frigate latest frame first, falls back to rpicam
# Claude vision timeout: 45s

# Write to persona-scoped notes.jsonl
PX_NOTE="Obi loves prime numbers" bin/tool-remember
# Recall recent notes
bin/tool-recall
# Output: {"status": "ok", "notes": [...]}

# Jailbroken Ollama chat — GREMLIN persona
PX_CHAT_TEXT="What do you think about entropy?" bin/tool-chat
# VIXEN persona
PX_CHAT_TEXT="Tell me about your old chassis" bin/tool-chat-vixen
# Both use Ollama on M1.local, think:false

# Launch SPARK voice loop (Claude backend)
bin/px-spark [--dry-run] [--input-mode voice|text]

# Three-layer cognitive daemon (run as systemd service)
bin/px-mind [--awareness-interval 60] [--dry-run]

# Idle-alive daemon — gaze drift, sonar proximity react
sudo bin/px-alive [--gaze-min 10] [--gaze-max 25] [--dry-run]
# Yields GPIO on SIGUSR1 for other tools

# Quick health check
bin/px-diagnostics --no-motion --short

# REST API + web UI on port 8420
bin/px-api-server [--dry-run]
# Auth: Bearer token from .env PX_API_TOKEN
# Web UI: http://pi:8420
# Public endpoints: /api/v1/public/* (no auth required)

# Always-on wake word listener + STT
bin/px-wake-listen [--convo-turns 5]
# STT priority: SenseVoice → faster-whisper → sherpa-onnx → Vosk
# Wake word: "hey robot" (PX_WAKE_WORD env var to change)
# Multi-turn: listens for follow-up after each response

# Battery monitoring daemon — polls every 30s
sudo bin/px-battery-poll
# Writes: state/battery.json
# Warns at 30/20/15%, emergency shutdown at 10%

# Camera RTSP stream via go2rtc
bin/px-frigate-stream
# go2rtc exposes rtsp://pi:8554/picar-x
# Frigate on pi5-hailo pulls the stream (pull model)
# Writes PID to logs/px-frigate-stream.pid for camera lock

# Autonomous wander — sonar-guided navigation
bin/px-wander [--dry-run]
# Sweeps 5 sonar angles, picks best direction, comments while navigating

# Social posting daemon — watches thoughts, posts qualifying ones
bin/px-post [--dry-run] [--backfill]
# Two-pass flush: batch feed writes, then 1 social post per cycle
# Branded 1080x1080 thought cards via Pillow
# Privacy filter blocks medical/custody/household content
# Claude QA gate rejects low-quality thoughts
# Bluesky: re-auths on 400/401 (expired token)
# PID-file single-instance guard

# Fetch current weather from BOM (Australian Bureau of Meteorology)
bin/tool-weather
# Output: {"status": "ok", "weather": {"temp_c": 14.2, "summary": "...", ...}}

# Pan/tilt camera toward a target
PX_PAN=30 PX_TILT=10 bin/tool-look
# Output: {"status": "ok", "pan": 30, "tilt": 10}
# Yields px-alive GPIO via SIGUSR1 before moving