Tiro Is an Adorable Little Desktop Robot Companion

We humans can anthropomorphize just about anything. Disney perfected the art of anthropomorphizing animals, but that was mere child’s play. By the late ‘80s, humanity’s best artists were making us empathize with courageous toasters. In the ‘90s, Japanese inventors made us feel compelled to care for creatures made of like 12 pixels. Give something expressive eyes, and our silly human brains will treat it like a baby. Exploiting that quirk of human nature, Redditor 1lemoncurd built this adorable little desktop robot companion called Tiro.

By every measure of rationality, this device should not make us feel anything. It is just a red, egg-shaped hunk of plastic with a tiny OLED screen. It doesn’t do anything and doesn’t make its owner’s life easier in any way. It doesn’t even speak or move. All it does is “look” around at its surroundings through a pair of animated eyes on the OLED screen. But we guarantee that you wouldn’t be able to observe Tiro for long before you start to feel sympathy for the little carmine ovoid.

The secret to Tiro’s emotional blackmail is in the eyes. If its owner doesn’t interact with it for a while, its expressive eyes will start showing sadness. It will grow sadder and sadder until someone nearby gives in and picks it up. That interaction (or any kind of movement) will lift Tiro’s spirits and cause it to look happy (or at least neutral) once again, which is visible through 12 different reactions.

Tiro’s construction is pretty simple. 1lemoncurd designed its body in Tinkercad and then 3D-printed the shell. Inside is a Raspberry Pi Pico development board, an accelerometer, a lithium battery, a power switch, and a micro USB port. 1lemoncurd programmed Tiro’s personality in Adafruit’s CircuitPython. That code is straightforward and simply monitors the accelerometer for movement.

We know that Tiro is manipulating our feelings, but we can’t help but love it.