Quick summary of my Cognitive stack:
The robot has a Raspberry Pi 5 in the head. For now, the Pi is mainly the eyes, ears, speaker, and pipe: camera stream, microphone input, audio output, and basic voice I/O. The heavier work runs offboard on a Mac Mini M4 that was already part of my home setup. The core idea is that the LLM is not the brain. The brain is the orchestration layer: memory, beliefs, goals, decisions, agents, and traceability. The LLM is only used to formulate the final answer from a context built by the system.
Current stack:
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- Pi 5 in the head for capture and I/O
- Mac Mini M4 for perception and cognition
- PostgreSQL + pgvector for memory
- Redis Streams as event bus
- MLXserve for local LLM inference
- FastAPI services for vision, dialogue, and cognition
What works now:
- persistent memory
- beliefs with confidence scores
- context built from the DB
- vision + memory orchestration
- multi-agent routing
- procedural skills
- traceable decisions
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Example: If I ask “Where is Granny’s USB key?”, the system does not let the LLM invent a location. It checks its stored beliefs, can run a locate_object plan, combine memory and vision, then answer from its actual state. Next step is connecting the physical body through a robot_daemon for servos, CAN, IMU, sensors, and later locomotion. Basically: Body control should stay fast, local, and safety-critical. The cognitive layer handles memory, dialogue, initiative, planning, and high-level orchestration. But locomotion will come later. First, I need to be able to build reliable actuators.



