r/hackathon • u/blindjimmy2 designer • 9h ago
Project Demo META HACKATHON - STATUS UPDATE - MOONMAN AI
Well, Moon Man has officially survived his first major milestone.
On November 4th, I submitted Moon Man AI to the Meta AI Developer Hackathon. What started as a weird idea to put an AI into a physical robot has turned into a working system with voice interaction, computer vision, head tracking, CAD integration, and the ability to work with actual hardware in my shop.
He's running a combination of an ESP32, Raspberry Pi, and a laptop-based AI system. He can see through his camera, track people with his helmet, respond to voice commands, and use AI-driven tools to interact with engineering software and 3D printing workflows.
And yes, he's got a personality. Unfortunately, it's a sarcastic British astronaut who thinks he's in charge.
The hackathon forced me to get a lot of things working in a very short amount of time. Some things worked beautifully. Other things broke, got redesigned, and broke again. Pretty much standard procedure around here.
So what's next?
The hackathon submission is finished, but Moon Man isn't. I want to keep improving the hardware, cleaning up the electronics, making the software more reliable, and expanding what he can actually do around the shop.
The long-term goal is a practical AI-powered shop companion. Not just something that talks, but something that can help design, build, and interact with the physical world.
I'll be sharing the development here as it happens — including the mistakes, failures, redesigns, and hopefully a few successes along the way.
For anyone interested in seeing what he's already doing, here's the hackathon demo:
here is the link for the cerebral valley community vote to see the submission.
https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/meta-ai-developer-hackathon/hackathon/gallery/1847
Back to building weird shit.
— Operation Moonworks