OpenClaw Can Program Your Arduino

OpenClaw (or whatever its name may be today) is all the rage lately. We have been promised AI assistants that can do everything for us, but now that the dust has settled, most people are finding them to be little more than glorified search engines. However, OpenClaw is changing that. It is capable of autonomously handling all sorts of digital tasks, like clearing out emails, managing calendars, or checking in for flights.

All you have to do to get these benefits is install OpenClaw on your computer. Well, then there is one other little thing — provide it with credentials for all of your personal accounts, then also connect it to a cloud-based LLM. What could go wrong? All you have to do is cough up all of your passwords and continually send bits of your private information to a remote server all day, every day.

However, Oliver from the Playduino YouTube channel realized that there is another way to make use of OpenClaw. If you don’t care about managing emails and calendars, you can skip giving the system access to all of your accounts. But then what is it good for? Well, OpenClaw has total access to the hardware of the machine you install it on, and it can even discover what hardware is available. Pair that with an LLM, and you could have a fun platform for experimentation with embedded software development.

To test out the idea, Oliver installed OpenClaw on an Arduino UNO Q. The only account he linked to it was Telegram — this is necessary as it is the interface through which one chats with OpenClaw. As far as the LLM is concerned, Claude was chosen to power the system.

With everything installed and a few kinks worked out, Oliver asked OpenClaw to write “Hi” on the onboard LED matrix. After a couple minutes of thinking — somewhat surprisingly — it actually worked. The text displayed perfectly on the LED matrix without writing a single line of code or installing a single library.

That is a pretty impressive result, but it took the LLM a lot of thinking to accomplish. A simple “Hello, World” project like this cost a few dollars in Claude credits to complete. Oliver describes the project as a very efficient way to get rid of your money, and for that reason he abandoned it. But the potential is clear: when costs come down in the future, this could become a very useful development platform.