NIKA — the robot that thinks in square waves

Overview

Everything MILA does, and a mind you can hear

Drive

Three modes

WASD, TANK and OBSTACLE, from the remote, her dashboard on :5013, the Python controller or NORA’s IR link.

Sense

Two ways to see a wall

An ultrasonic on a servo looks ahead and to both diagonals, and an infrared sensor says “something’s there”. Either one stops her.

Show

Sixteen LEDs and an OLED

The LEDs are the colour of her thought while she drives; the OLED shows her mode, what’s ahead and what she’s thinking.

Think

A synthesizer brain

Her drives are square-wave oscillators. The loudest is her thought, and the synth plays it.

Fleet

The ladder and the link

She joins the fleet’s network at the very bottom, below MILA, registers with the hub, and NORA can drive her over IR (0x0DA5).

Safe

The guard and her PIN

Driven by hand she won’t go into a wall, ticks faster as one gets close, and only an unlocked controller can drive her.

Mind

MIND mode

The LLM on her PC controller drives her, one short move at a time — and it feels what her synth brain feels: her thought and its Hz are among its senses. M on the controller.

The synth brain

She thinks in square waves

Drive	Frequency	What moves it	Exploring, she drives at
calm	196 Hz	always there, the hum underneath	80%
curious	220–660 Hz	the way ahead staying open	100%
caution	220–880 Hz	something getting close; 880 when the IR sensor sees it	45%
social	523 Hz, fading	hearing NORA over the IR link	55%, and a hello

A digital potentiometer sits where the synthesizer kit’s frequency pot was, so NIKA sets its pitch, and with the kit’s square-wave jumper on, what you hear is her thought.

Hardware

What she's built from

01 UNO + WiFi R3 board (ATmega328P + ESP8266), like MILA
02 L298N motor driver and a wooden tank chassis (like IDA’s)
03 HC-SR04 ultrasonic on a servo
04 IR obstacle sensor (on/off)
05 16-LED RGB array (WS2812)
06 SSD1306 128×32 SPI OLED
07 Synthesizer kit (XR2206-style) + MCP41010 digital pot
08 IR remote + receiver, buzzer

Quick start

Get her thinking

Copy scripts/esp8266/secrets.example.h to secrets.h.
Flash scripts/NIKA to the UNO and scripts/esp8266 to the ESP8266, with the DIP switches set for each.
Put the synth kit’s jumper on square wave, and tune SYNTH_K by ear.
Power her on and open http://<her IP>:5013/, or run run.bat.