Recon Chinchilla.
The story of RC-01.
Building a Raspberry Pi companion called Ash, from bench hardware to perception, behavior, and a voice.
RC-01 is an ongoing companion build centered on a Raspberry Pi 5. Its engineering journal follows camera integration, Hailo-8 inference, presence detection, internal state, behavior events, and developing audio capabilities. The work is being qualified a layer at a time.
This journal brings together four ways to follow RC-01: daily logs for the details, weekly posts for the bigger picture, milestones for completed achievements, and stories for everything that makes the project its own.
The first historical collection covers documented work from September 16 through October 1, 2026. Entries retain their record dates and show when they were published to the website. Days without a recovered journal entry are left unfilled. Older checkpoints describe the evidence available at that time.
We want the record to be useful as well as honest. An experiment can fail and still teach us something. A plan is a plan until it has been carried out. A milestone should reflect what has actually been verified.
The website is the curated public side of the project. The private project source book and evidence archive stay separate; public entries share selected results and context.