Building FOFOCA: An Open-Source AI Robot with ESP32, ESP32-C3, and Edge AI
FOFOCA is an open-source reference design for an AI-governed household robot, built around a Raspberry Pi 5 brain, an ESP32 for real-time motor control and sensor polling, and an ESP32-C3 driving an OLED status display over MQTT. This article walks through the hardware architecture, the firmware running on each Espressif chip, and how all of it connects to a local edge AI server running NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 8B for inference — no cloud dependency required.