Every project needs a “Hello World,” and for TheCube, mine is simple: get the hardware booting, the display working, and the voice pipeline online.

Here’s where things stand so far:

Hardware Prototype

• Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB RAM + NVMe SSD

• Custom carrier board (in progress) for expansion ports and clean stacking

• 4" square 720×720 LCD (DSI)

• mmWave presence sensor hooked into GPIO

• Stereo mics + speaker wired through USB audio adapter

• Early 3D-printed shell with magnets embedded for stackability

Software Stack (early build)

• Base OS: Raspberry Pi OS Lite

• Core process: C++ service managing JSON-RPC app interface

• Voice pipeline:

  • Wake word → [OpenWakeWord]

  • Speech-to-text → Whisper.cpp (local inference)

  • Intent parsing → in-progress - Function Registry + Spacy + AI model

• Display: SDL2-based renderer (Planned. Currently using SFML.)

• First “Hello World”: TheCube listens for “Hey Cube,” and prints a notification to stdout/log.

Next Steps

• Get voice transcribing working

• Pop up a window on the screen to indicate that the wakeword has been detected and it is transcribing

• Implement personality “sliders” so TheCube can be stoic or cheeky even in basic responses

• Clean up enclosure design for the first showcase build

This is still early days, but it’s already fun seeing the Cube come to life. Next log: I’ll post the first working demo video of TheCube recognizing a command and responding out loud.