zclaw: personal AI assistant in under 888 KB, running on an ESP32

I have a couple ESP32 with a very small OLED display, I'm now thinking I could make an "intelligent" version of the Tamagotchi with this. Do you HN crowd have other cool ideas?

This is a great example of how silly this whole thing is. There’s next to nothing to these claws. Turns out that if you give an llm the ability to call APIs they will.

"LLM backends: Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter."

And here I was hoping that this was local inference :)

Genuinely curious - did you use a coding agent for most of this or does this level if performance take hand written code?

Relevant: https://github.com/sipeed/picoclaw

This is absolutely glorious. We used to talk about "smart devices" and IoT… I would be so curious to see what would happen if these connected devices had a bit more agency and communicative power. It's easy to imagine the downsides, and I don't want my email to be managed from an ESP23 device, but what else could this unlock?

Is there a heartbeat alternative? I feel like this is the magic behind OpenClaw and what gives it the "self-driven" feel.

Serious question: why? What are the use cases and workflows?

I don't really need any assistance...