AI Halloween

 My son wanted me to make a "Verity" interactive Halloween display. Verity is a "helpful ai assistant" minecraft mod that turns into a monster.

So I decided to see if I could make a real-time AI chat bot using my local AI models.

I used NVIDIA Nemotron Speech Streaming English 0.6B for the speech to text
that sent the text to qwen3-4b (I used a smaller model so verity could respond in under a second, I wanted it to be as natural as possible)
then the response from qwen3-4b went to Qwen3-TTS-12Hz-0.6B-Base for text to speech.

qwen3-tts has a nice feature that also lets you do "deepfake" or voice cloning. This was great so I could get the exact verity voice that my son was familiar with.

overall I think it went pretty well. And based on the logs, kids loved playing with it.

Verity would answer any question the kids had (since the model's are not censored, I replaced all bad words between its "brain" and its "mouth" so the kids could try to trick it into saying bad words, but the words would be replaced with silly words like "pickle" or "shoe" before converted into audio.

Verity would start happy, but get more and more frustrated if you tell him he's wrong, or are mean to him. Eventually saying "You know what? take your candy and get out!"

Action figure vehicles

At this point I've printed a ton of custom/stock action figures. I figured they needed some vehicles.

Happy kid for scale.

Motorcycle Jet and Jeep

Cliffnotes

Our son is now reading, and part of his homework is to read everyday for 15 minutes. He has free time after school that he wanted to use to read on his own. 

While I want to trust him completely, and let him know that we trust him... I also remember being his age, and the temptation to lie about reading, would set up a precedent that I don't want to encourage.

This could easily just be done by asking chatgpt (if it knows the book) but I wanted this to be local, so I could source the data, and confirm the accuracy.

You could also just ctrl+f search in a digital version of the book, but that only works for exact matches.

So I created this application that uses local ai models to summarize books, and ask it questions about the book. The model "understands" the book content, so you can ask it questions without knowing exactly what to search for.

This allows us to let our son to read on his own, then ask him a few questions about what he read afterwards and confirm. "trust but verify" lol

Here is the code: https://github.com/spiffomatic64/cliffnotes

Parents action figures

Welp... Now he has 3d printed versions of his parents...

Hopefully he goes easy on us lol.

3D scanned action figure head

 I was testing some new AI models, and put together some tools that let me create 3d models from photos. This is "less accurate" than photogrammetry, but more realistic... basically it "fudges the details" in typical ai-slot fashion.

I'm using ReconViaGen Pixal3D and TRELLIS.2-4B along with Qwen3.8-27B as an agent with hermes-agent

Before we even had our son, I told my wife that I had one requirement before we had a kid... That before he was old enough to appreciate it, we had to get a 3d printer...

There are many reasons, but the biggest for me, was that I wanted to print custom action figures for "future child".

Being able to 3d scan his face, add compatible sockets to make it compatible with the other action figures I print for him so  I could make a "personalized action figure" the same scale as all his other Fortnite action figures... is amazing...

Can you imagine having an action figure of yourself to play and fight with all your other favorite super heroes and villains?

I can't wait for when he's old enough to understand how insane this is... lol for now its just normal, and that's how it should be, IMO.

Novation Circuit

My son has had an interest in music for a long time...

So much so, that I had been brainstorming the best way to introduce him to music, without forcing him to take lessons in something.

His favorite type of music is electronic/techno/edm, so I decided to research groovebox's (a box that lets you do drums, synth, and easily make music.

I landed on the Novation Circuit 

The colorful lights, pleasant buttons, and easy to understand sequencer (the lights go left to right to show time) was perfect.

But alot of the really cool synths were only supported on their newer model, the novation circuit tracks (yea... their naming is stupid)

See the difference? lol

Anyway, I decided to let my local qwen model reverse engineer their synth format, to convert the new format, into the old format so he could play with the cool sounds.

It works "mostly" great, im sure there are bugs, but it works good enough for him... 

Heres the code: https://github.com/spiffomatic64/circuit-tracks-to-og

Talkboy

After watching home alone, our son obviously wanted a talk boy...

Quick hacked this together using my local ai model.

Code: https://github.com/spiffomatic64/talkboy