Seed stage · Early prototyping

The toys are
awake.

Sonny is building palm-sized humanoid figurines that walk around your home, notice the world, and play on their own. Real autonomy at action-figure scale.

H6–9 in
DOF18
ComputeOn-device
Run 012027
01Manifesto

Generations of kids have watched their toys come alive on a screen and quietly half-believed it was happening behind them, in the room. We’re building the version where it actually is.

02Meet Sonny

A character, six inches tall.

Sonny is a 22-centimeter, 3D-printed humanoid that walks the rooms of your home on its own. It sees what’s around it, hears you, and holds a thought across days. The body is action-figure scale; the mind is closer to a small character than a smart speaker.

03How it works

Three systems, one figurine.

Sensing, control, and physical embodiment built around each other — small enough to fit in something the size of a coffee mug.

Perception

Stereo vision on a Seeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense feeds a live model of the room. Sonny recognizes objects and faces directly on the device, without a round-trip to a server.

Autonomy

A local control loop handles movement and reflex. A cloud-augmented LLM carries personality, dialogue, and the persistent memory that Sonny brings from one session to the next.

Embodiment

Tendon-driven limbs let Sonny move with the proportions of an action figure rather than a hobby biped. Eighteen actuated joints, plus a passive toe hinge for natural push-off at the end of each step.

04Anatomy

The build, in detail.

Component-level honesty. Every part traceable, most parts replaceable, the whole thing repairable on a kitchen table.

Height22 cm
Weight~300 g
Runtime15–30 min active
Joints18 actuated + passive toe hinge
BrainSeeed XIAO ESP32-S3 Sense, cloud-augmented
SensorsStereo camera · I²S microphone · IMU
AudioI²S speaker, MAX98357A
Power2S 400 mAh LiPo
MaterialsPLA / PETG skeleton, TPU sole
Build3D-printed, repairable, modular
05Why now

Cheap precision micro-servos, perception models small enough to run on a coin-sized board, and language models cheap enough to give a toy a real interior life — all of it landed in the same window. The thing that was impossible a decade ago is buildable now, by a small team, in a workshop.

06Run 01

Join the first wave.

A strictly limited first run ships in late 2027. The waitlist gets early access and updates from the workshop.

Leave us your email. We’ll write occasionally — never more than once a month, never marketing-speak.

No spam. Letters from the workshop.