The One Smart AI Pen – A ballpoint pen with Bluetooth and a microphone for translation, LLM integration, note taking (Crowdfunding)

The One Smart AI Pen

You may have seen the “Sell me that pen. It’s AI-powered” meme if you are a social media user. It may have started as a joke, but Zakwan Ahmad made the meme become reality with “The One Smart AI Pen” which is basically a standard ballpoint pen with a battery, Bluetooth connectivity, a microSD card, and a microphone. The AI part is not exactly inside the pen per se, but in a smartphone’s app called Hearit.ai that allows the user to translate his/her voice input, use a range of LLMs such as ChatGPT, recording a meeting, or taking notes, for example, to schedule events or meetings. The One Smart AI Pen specifications: “AI chip” –  Not clear why it’s needed here… unless it transcribes audio into text inside the pen (as opposed to inside the phone) Storage – MicroSD card slot inside the pen Wireless – Bluetooth 5.2 with up […]

Loomos AI smart glasses integrate GPT-4o, offer a 16MP camera and hi-fi audio for $199+ (Crowdfunding)

loomos AI smart glasses with 16MP camera

Chinese power supply company, SHARGE, has launched a pair of GPT-4o-powered smart glasses with a 16-megapixel camera capable of capturing 4K photos and 1080p videos. Like the Looktech AI glasses and Meta Ray-Ban series, the Loomos AI smart glasses have no onboard display. Instead, they feature a microphone array, onboard speakers, and side buttons for user control and feedback. The Loomos glasses are powered by a 2.0Ghz UNISOC quad-core processor and come integrated with the multi-modal GPT-4o for real-time AI assistance. The stated battery life is much more impressive than the competition at 40 hours of standby time (from a 450mAh battery). The company also offers a 6,500mAh neckband power bank for uninterrupted all-day wearing. The company promises security and privacy with the glasses. Data is processed anonymously with TLS encryption and users retain full control of their data. The glasses also include an indicator light to alert people around […]

exo software – A distributed LLM solution running on a cluster of computers, smartphones, or SBCs

Exo software distributed LLM solution

You’d typically need hardware with a large amount of memory and bandwidth and multiple GPUs, if you want to run the latest large language models (LLMs), such as DeepSeek R1 with 671 billion parameters. But such hardware is not affordable or even available to most people, and the Exo software works around that as a distributed LLM solution working on a cluster of computers with or without NVIDIA GPUs, smartphones, and/or single board computers like Raspberry Pi boards. In some ways, exo works like distcc when compiling C programs over a build farm, but targets AI workloads such as LLMs instead. Key features of Exo software: Support for LLaMA (MLX and tinygrad), Mistral, LlaVA, Qwen, and Deepseek. Dynamic Model Partitioning – The solution splits up models based on the current network topology and device resources available in order to run larger models than you would be able to on any […]

Looktech’s AI-powered smart glasses offer a 14-hour battery life, 13MP camera, and linear audio for $209 and up (Crowdfunding)

Looktech AI-powered smart glasses

Looktech AI Glasses are AI-powered smart glasses with a “privacy-focused design” and several lens options. They are similar to Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses but support GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini instead of Meta AI. Like Meta’s smart glasses, the Looktech AI Glasses incorporate headphones, a camera, and an AI model for a hands-free experience and personalized AI assistance. According to Looktech, the smart glasses can track calories, find recipes, set reminders, and perform image searches. The in-built 13MP camera can be used to capture high-res images and videos and the open-ear dual speakers provide “rich, spatialized immersive audio while keeping you aware of your surroundings.” Looktech has given some hardware specifications for the product but the list is a bit sparse. We have covered the much cheaper but underpowered LILYGO T-Glass. Although there are no promises of a physical AI agent, the Looktech glasses are similar to the M5Stack’s Module LLM […]

XGO-Rider is a 2-wheel self-balancing robot with an ESP32 controller plus either a Raspberry Pi CM4 or BBC Micro:bit (Crowdfunding)

XGO-Rider

XGO-Rider is a two-wheel self-balancing robot with an ESP32 controller for motor and servo control, USB-C charging, etc… and a choice between a Raspberry Pi CM4 module or a BBC Micro:bit board for display, audio, and camera (CM4-only). It’s not the first robot from Luwu Intelligence, since the company launched the XGO-Mini robot dog in 2021, followed by the XGO 2 Raspberry Pi CM4-powered desktop robotic dog with an arm which we reviewed last year. The new XGO-Rider builds on these earlier models but in a different form factor moving from four-legged robots to a 2-wheel self-balancing robot design with many of the same features including AI vision running on the Raspberry Pi CM4. XGO-Rider specifications: Host controller (one or the other) Raspberry Pi CM4 with 2GB RAM + ESP32 for main control, USB-C charging port, DIP switch BBC Micro:bit V2 + ESP32 for main control, USB-C charging port, DIP […]

Vivid Unit is a low-profile Rockchip RK3399 SBC with an integrated touchscreen display

Rockchip RK3399 SBC integrated touchscreen display

UUGear’s Vivid Unit is a low-profile SBC with an integrated 5.5-inch 1280×720 touchscreen display powered by the older Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core Cortex-A72/A53 SoC coupled with 4GB RAM and a 32GB eMMC flash. The board also comes with gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 4 connectivity, supports M.2 NVMe storage, offers HDMI output and a MIPI CSI camera input,  integrates a speaker and a stereo microphone, and allows for expansion through a 40-pin GPIO header and other headers for ADC and USB. Vivid Unit specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 CPU – Hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A72 cores up to 1.8GHz, 4x Arm Cortex-A53 cores up to 1.4GHz GPU – Arm Mali-T860MP4 GPU AI accelerator – 6 TOPS NPU System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4 Storage 32GB eMMC flash M.2 socket for NVMe SSD Display – 5.5-inch touchscreen display with 1280×720 resolution Video Output – HDMI port Camera Input – MIPI CSI camera […]

SaraKIT – An Raspberry Pi CM4 board with ChatGPT-based voice control, motor control, and plenty of sensors (Crowdfunding)

Raspberry Pi CM4 ChatGPT board

SaraKIT is a carrier board for the Raspberry Pi CM4 system-on-module with BLDC motor controllers and a range of sensors for robotics, support for ChatGPT-based voice control through three microphones and a ZL38063 audio chip, and two MIPI CSI connectors for cameras. The versatile board can be used for voice-controlled products, robots, home automation systems, and interfacing with smart home or office devices. The company also developed various demos such as a Smartphone-controlled LEGO RC car, a self-balancing LEGO robot, a pan-and-tilt camera, various AI demos using MediaPipe such as face tracking and object detection, as well as audio demos using ChatGPT, Alexa, and/or Google Home. SaraKIT specifications: Support system-on-modules – Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) with future CM5 compatibility. MCU – Microchip dsPIC33 16-bit microcontroller with 32 KB SRAM for motor control and LSM6DS3TR sensor Audio Microchip ZL38063 (previously MicroSemi) audio processor for microphone arrays. 3x Knowles SPH0655 […]

AI in a box offline LLM solution leverages Rockchip RK3588S’ NPU (Crowdfunding)

offline open source LLM Radxa Rock 5A

Useful Sensors “AI in a box” LLM (large language model) solution works offline with complete privacy and leverages the NPU in Rockchip RK3588S processor for conversational AI similar to ChatGPT but without an internet connection or registration required. The AI box prototype currently relies on off-the-shelf hardware, specifically the Radxa ROCK 5A SBC with 8GB RAM, housed in a plastic enclosure, and the code relies on open-source models like Whisper speech-to-text model and Llama2 language models.   Besides conversational AI where you can interact with the box as if you were talking to a person, the AI in a Box can also be useful for other use cases: Live Captions – The box can display subtitles/closed captions for a live event or help in situations where people have trouble hearing a conversation using the audio input. Live Translation – It can also translate various languages close to real-time. Simply select […]

Youyeetoo X1 x86 SBC