The DIY OpenClaw Assistant You’ll Actually Want to Carry

OpenClaw is changing so fast these days that it’s hard to keep track of its name. Heck, it’s hard to even know if it’s open anymore after OpenAI hired its creator. But whatever is happening in this huge whirlwind of activity, one thing is certain — people still love OpenClaw (or whatever it may be called today) and are building all sorts of devices that make use of it.

The latest creation to surface comes from a maker that goes by the handle “Kidumaro.” It is a cute little handheld personal assistant that easily fits in your pocket. Users simply press a button, speak their request, and then OpenClaw magic happens.

The device uses just a few components, making assembly very simple. There is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer for general-purpose computing, and a Whisplay HAT that adds a 1.69-inch LCD display, speaker, microphone, and buttons to provide everything that is needed for a personal assistant project. A PiSugar battery module keeps the system powered up on the go.

Now, a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W may punch above its weight in many respects, but it can’t run OpenClaw. For this reason, Kidumaro uses the handheld as a tool to interface with more powerful hardware on the backend. It records user requests, transcribes them, then sends the text to an OpenClaw instance running in a cloud computing environment. Responses are sent back to the device, where they can be played on the speaker or shown on the screen.

Since the real processing happens elsewhere, there are lots of other ways to build a project like this. In the simplest case, one might just develop a phone app. That would work the same way — but would it be as cool as this dedicated device? I don’t think so.

There is no build guide as of yet, but with just a few hardware components, the device would be really easy to build. Using Kidumaro’s processing workflow, development of the software wouldn’t be too challenging either.