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I Paid TongDou One Coffee. Now I Owe Him 3.1415.

A project log for TongDou

A tiny ESP32-S3 desktop gremlin made from brass and PCB, with OLED eyes, motors, sensors, audio, and an AI-connected personality layer.

solitary-devsolitary dev 08/03/2026 at 09:590 Comments

I finally finished the “confused accountant” scene that I mentioned in the first TongDou project log.

I gave TongDou a tiny ledger and let him handle my coffee debts.

That was a mistake.

He clears one debt, invents suspicious new fees, accepts a bribe, forgets the original number, and eventually decides that I now owe him exactly 3.1415 coffees.

He also refuses to round down.

The scene is made from five small variations:

- normal payment
- invented fees
- accepting a bribe
- selective memory
- absurd inflation

The interaction is scripted and runs locally. Prerecorded voice, OLED expressions, ledger animations, sound effects, and small wheel gestures are synchronized to the same scene timeline.

I recorded my own replies in Chinese and added English subtitles. TongDou answers in English, so it feels less like a hardware demonstration and more like an argument with a tiny accountant living on my desk.

The accounting is terrible, but at least the timing works.

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