Spencer Soohoo.
June 12, 2026 1 min read EngineeringSoftware

Waymo x Tamagotchi collab

My take on a robotic pet (for science) — mixing mechanical engineering with LLMs and automation.

While at work at US Synthetic, in between my traditional big boy engineering responsibilities of CAD, meetings, and design, I designed and assembled my own circuit board before wiring my own controller for a vibratory feeder. It was an incredibly fun experience for me, and reminded me how there are very few things in the world that I enjoy more than problem solving while doing hands on engineering work

I want more of that in my life so I decided to build a robot. I want to do more than just a line following lego though, I want some real AI powered decision making. So I decided to get an Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano Super Development kit and use that platform to integrate lidar, camera depth + labeling vision, microphone + speaker, object tracking, and mecanum wheels together.

I am starting this project as a hobby because I am very interested in AI, and how it fits within my first productive love, mechanical engineering.

I hope to learn a lot from this project, and it will deeper my understanding of LLMs and automation. I also am hoping to use this and my learnings on it for my startup ideation.

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