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Comment by Philip-J-Fry | Hacker News Reader

That's a completely different class of robot. The Beni robot is just a toy, it's just connect the app and drive it around, record videos and do some fancy tricks like flips. It is not meant to be a platform you program yourself.

The Microduck is meant to be a hacker toy. Train it yourself, write software, hack it, etc.

It depends what you're trying to get for your daughter. Is it something to get her into robotics? Then probably the Microduck is the way. If it's literally just a toy, then the Beni robot is better because that's literally all it is.

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I would describe the Microduck as more of a toy than Beni. Autonomous cameraman is a real application that Beni performs out of the box. I think you'll struggle to get Microduck to do anything genuinely useful.

IMO with that definition of "toy" you're overselling the value of performing useful work and underselling the value of farting about.

The creators of Beni seem to have promised that the platform will be open (including sim2real parts of Beni).

I have ordered Beni for my family. It's sturdy and more practical for careless fun.

Their current messaging is "we're busy, no promises" on dev kit or API access -- where did you see this open promise? I'm super curious.

UPDATE: That's their kickstarter customer service. Their subreddit has founders liberally promising API/devkit access, targeted at Q1 '27

i think i heard someplace that ssh/adb is open by default, if true, that is ENOUGH for me to take over and do the rest on my own.

That would be awesome. Probably worth getting a v1 and not upgrading the firmware just to be sure

I'm an early backer and plan on jailbreaking Beni ASAP. Seems like really, really cool hardware.

With Unitree bots all but banned in the US I've been looking to pivot away from that platform anyway. Took a couple months to jailbreak the Go2 platform initially, but I'm betting this will go even faster with modern agents

> Train it yourself, write software, hack it, etc.

it seems like the only useful capability this thing has is picking up very small items of clothing with I imagine a very low success rate.

Weird phrasing "just a toy" for one and "hacker toy" for the other. Beni is actually something you can use more than a toy.

yes to both :)

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