A 1984 Omnibot gets a Pi 5 brain and a Ring-O eye

Difficulty

Advanced

AI-buildability

3/5

The tone synthesis, YOLO tracking and steering rules are software AI can write, but restoring a corroded 40-year-old board, repairing the wheels and integrating the hardware is hands-on work.

Time

A few weeks

Cost

$250–450

Estimates based on the original write-up. How AI-buildability is scored. The maker built this with AI tools: more vibe-coded builds. Building with an AI assistant? Connect it to Afterware (free MCP server).

Tomy's 1984 Omnibot came to Moonlighter FabLab with battery acid eating its main board. Mario Cruz spent hours with isopropyl alcohol, a toothbrush and a soldering iron to bring its 40-year-old logic back. Ten seconds into the first drive, the rubber wheels fell apart. The restoration kept growing from there.

The hook was the original cassette deck. The robot read audio tones as motor commands: 1614Hz for forward, 2208Hz for left, 1422Hz to switch the cassette audio to the speaker. A Bluetooth cassette adaptor and a Raspberry Pi script that synthesized those tones let a laptop drive the robot across the kitchen. A spare AI camera running YOLO, plus a companion robot named Ring-O built by Placitech, turned it into something that tracks people.

The lesson is in the controls. An LLM answered "right" for every frame position, so Cruz replaced 200 lines of prompt engineering with about fifty lines of arithmetic: left of center turns left, centered goes forward, more than 60% of the frame means stop. Anyone with an old robot and a camera can steal that rule set.