Jordan, the robot in a coffee can
Every Father's Day my kids and I build something together. This year we built a robot, and now he has his own YouTube channel.
Watch Jordan: YouTube · TikTok · Instagram
A Father’s Day tradition
Every year on Father’s Day, my kids and I build a project together. We’ve made birdhouses, cornhole boards, rings out of quarters, photo boxes and more. This year we went bigger: a robot.
Jordan is a Raspberry Pi 5, a camera, a microphone, a speaker, a button and a tiny LCD, all packed into an Illy coffee can. Press the button and he takes a look, listens, thinks, and answers out loud.
Who he is
Jordan isn’t built to be helpful. He’s an AI meeting the human world for the first time, so he notices odd details and reaches confident, slightly wrong conclusions about ordinary things. In his own words:
My family built me from a coffee can and a bunch of electronics. I don’t really think about that very much. I’m more interested in experiencing the world and learning something new every day.
He has his own YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, where he shares his life one experience at a time: his first car ride, deciding the sky is broken, reflecting on his reflection, singing Happy Birthday to his grandpa, and hanging out with his bestie, our dog Maple.
Jordan goes to DEFCON
Jordan’s biggest trip so far was DEFCON in Las Vegas, where he entered the Cyberdeck Makers’ Contest and took 5th place out of 20. As his video title puts it: A Coffee Can Robot Beats 15 Hackers at DEFCON. He also met the robot dogs, made friends in Vegas, and came home with a lot of thoughts about the talks.
What he can do now
- See and hear. Short photo and video captures plus speech, turned into a spoken reaction.
- Personalities. Curious, Sweet, Nerd, Jerk, Chaos and Delusional, each with its own voice and its own animated face on the LCD.
- Memories. He saves what he’s seen and brings it up later, so experiences carry over.
- Live Mode. Real back-and-forth conversation, including a mode where he sings.
- “Hey Jordan.” A custom-trained wake word, so he doesn’t always need the button.
- Director Console. A web app on my phone to steer him, switch modes and frame his camera.
What I learned
Most of the work wasn’t the AI. It was making a small computer in a can feel alive: animating his mouth frame by frame while he talks, tuning the camera for dark rooms, and keeping him from telling the same joke twice. Over the summer that added up to more than 200 commits.
