Although I am not keen on selling all of my collection, I wanted to enable the application to track eBay and Amazon listings of the target figurines and the adjacent collectibles to get a grasp of the market price and availability of my collection. Also, I decided to make the application to generate pamphlets (simple HTML pages) for each figurine while conducting market analysis to track new listings.
As I decided to use the Hermes AI agent to track eBay and Amazon listings, my workflow was quite straightforward for market analysis and pamphlet generation, since the Hermes agent provides an intuitive structure for creating skills manually, adjusting them via chat, and scheduling cron jobs for periodic tasks such as processing web-scraped product listings. Even though the Hermes AI agent handles the market analysis, it is not required to execute the mini-figurine cataloging operations since I programmed the application from scratch. To enable the agent to run as deterministically as possible, I tasked it to only update existing listing variables and generate the pamphlet in HTML as a separate file. In this regard, the application can operate without showing any web-scraped listings and is capable of cataloging mini-figurines, even if the Hermes agent is excluded.
I decided to program the web-based mini-figurine cataloger application on Arduino UNO Q by employing the Arduino App Lab development environment, providing foundational building blocks (Bricks). Since UNO Q is a compact but extremely powerful development board, I was able to run the Hermes AI agent locally. Thus, enabling the Hermes agent to update listing information, stored as individual JSON database files for each figurine, was quite straightforward.
Of course, it would not be a worthy mini-figurine cataloger without the feature of automated yet comprehensive figurine photographing. Thus, I decided to build a rig enabling the App Lab application to capture 360° pictures at varying camera distances automatically. To achieve this automation, I designed a rotary platform swiveling the target mini-figurine and a linear camera slider moving the attached USB camera — Logitech Brio 4K webcam.
Since I wanted to design the rig as compact as possible, I decided to take a different approach for detecting the platform angles and the camera distances, and utilized two TCRT5000 infrared (IR) sensor modules. It is a well-known optical reflective sensor for line tracking robots due to its ability to easily differentiate white from black; the former bounces back IR radiation from the emitter to the phototransistor, while the latter absorbs the IR radiation to the point of avoiding phototransistor trigger. Instead of using stepper motors, I employed two Pololu high-power micro metal gearmotors due to their small footprint.
For swiveling the target mini-figurines, I decided to design a rotary platform based on the worm gear-wheel mechanism, which reduces the cataloger rig's footprint considerably and locks the platform base from moving when the cataloger rig is idle, since the worm gear-wheel mechanism is inherently non-back-drivable. For moving the camera slider, I simply designed a GT2 belt-driven mechanism. Since there were no suitable GT2 pulleys for the gearmotors, I modified an existing GT2 20T pulley model to produce a custom 3D-printable one.
While I was working on the cataloger rig design, I decided to lighten the platform base to emphasize the target figurine details, especially for vintage figurines, and create unique background icons related to the figurine category and aesthetic. For the lighting source, I decided to utilize a WS2813 RGB LED strip and enable the user to adjust the lighting manually via buttons or remotely via an RGB color picker wheel presented by the mini-figurine web interface. For the background icons, I decided to design custom magnetic ornaments and added an electromagnet to the rig in order to attach and change the ornaments in accordance...
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Kutluhan Aktar








































The project's GitHub repository provides:
✅ Code files
✅ The mini-figurine cataloger App Lab application's ZIP folder
✅ 3D component design files (STL)
✅ Edge Impulse audio classification model (EIM binary for UNO Q)
✅ Hermes AI agent skill files (markdown)