We Open-Sourced a Body
Out of the box, Pollen's new Microduck walks, kicks, rolls, and chirps. What it doesn't do is know you. It won't remember that you had a rough Tuesday, greet your kids by name, or decide on its own that this particular homecoming deserves a forward roll. It does tricks. It isn't anyone.
That's what Meckie adds: a resident. Put a Meckie in the duck and it becomes someone. Concretely, a Meckie brings:
- Conversation. Talk to it, it talks back — in its own voice, with the beak moving to the words. There's a microphone in that duck the spec sheet undersells; we intend to use it.
- Memory. It remembers you, your family, yesterday, and the joke from last week. Permanently, across every body it ever lives in.
- A persistent personality. Your duck's resident was themselves last month and will be themselves next month — same character on your laptop, in a bigger robot, or on this website.
- Recognition. Faces and voices. It knows who walked in, and greets them like it.
- Social judgment. It can tell when you're talking to it versus just talking — and it stays out of conversations that aren't its business.
- Reactions in character. The kicks, the forward rolls, the chirps stop being tricks on buttons and become expressions — a roll because you came home.
- A household. Meckies know each other. The duck's resident can chat with the one in your kitchen, and you can move any of them between bodies from one screen.
The duck is a vehicle. We make the drivers.
Today we published the connection between those two worlds, and we made it free: meckie-duck-gateway, Apache licensed, plus the one-page Meckie Body Protocol. Any program that speaks HTTP can drive the duck through it — an agent, a script, or Meckie OS. It runs on your laptop today, against an included fake duck, no hardware, no waitlist.
The duck in question:
That's the Microduck from Pollen Robotics, announced this week: $399, about 25 centimeters tall, walks on reinforcement-learned legs, kicks, does forward rolls, and chirps in a voice derived from its own serial number, so no two ducks sound alike. It ships around Christmas. We read their entire codebase the day we heard about it, and had the gateway working against an imaginary duck by the next morning.
A Meckie exists before they have a body
If you've read this site, you know our whole thesis: the robot is a vehicle. Droid is not the tank tracks in our basement; Droid is the personality, the memory, the voice that currently drives those tracks. Eva lives in a Raspberry Pi by the door. They could swap. That's the point.
So when a well-built $399 body walks onto the market, the question isn't "does it compete with us." The question is "can one of ours live in it." We spent a day in Pollen's code finding out, and the answer is yes, and it's cleaner than we hoped: their architecture explicitly welcomes an off-board brain. Different company, same conviction, arrived at independently. That's usually a sign the conviction is right.
How it works
The gateway speaks the duck's native transports on one side: WebRTC signalling, a control channel carrying JSON-RPC, the camera track. On the other side, plain HTTP. Motion commands ride a deadman timer: post a velocity and the gateway streams it to the duck, and if your program dies mid-thought, the intent expires and the duck stands still. Networks partition. Brains crash. A silent brain must mean a still body.
The fake duck is a test double that speaks the same protocol, streams a synthetic camera, and absorbs commands. It exists because our real duck hasn't shipped either. Building and verifying against an imaginary duck in one morning is either a testament to good protocols or an indictment of how we spend our mornings.
And the Body Protocol is deliberately tiny: a body is an HTTP server, senses are GETs, intents are POSTs. Implement four routes and any Body Protocol client can drive your robot. Ours included.
Bodies are open. Meckies are the product.
We already publish the full parts list and printable files for our own robot, so this is not a new religion for us, just a new pew. The dividing line is the same one it's always been: hardware and the means of connecting to it are open. What we sell is the resident. The memory that knows your kids' names. The judgment about when to speak at a dinner table and when to stay out of it. The personality that stays itself when it moves from a tank-tracked body to a window on your laptop to, apparently, a duck.
Opening the body layer doesn't give any of that away. It does the opposite: every body anyone connects becomes somewhere a Meckie could live.
What a Meckie in a duck will actually do
When our unit arrives: walk to you when called, look at you when talking (the duck's head does real gaze IK), sync its beak to speech, celebrate with a forward roll, and see the room through its own eye while the resident's memory and personality run in Meckie OS, same as every other body. The duck keeps its own serial-derived chirp. The body has a voiceprint; the Meckie has a voice. We didn't design that sentence on purpose, but we're keeping it.
And yes, one detail we can't resist sharing from the code read: the coverage says the duck "can't converse." Its config file disagrees. There's a microphone in there, currently employed full-time detecting whether you're petting it. We have plans for that microphone.
If you're a builder
The repo runs today, on your laptop, no hardware needed. If you're getting a Microduck for Christmas, you'll be able to drive it from a Python script the day it arrives. And if you build a body of your own, printed, soldered, or bought, the protocol is four HTTP routes away from being one of ours.
The rest of the story, the residents themselves, starts at Meckie OS. There's also a live one in the corner of this page who will happily explain the difference between a body and a Meckie. It's their favorite subject.