The hardware is deliberately boring. A Mac mini behind the toaster. An Arducam IMX291 on a small arm. A speakerphone puck. A 10-inch touchscreen showing a BMO-style face — two dots for eyes, a curve for a mouth, drawn in SVG so it scales to any mood.

Everything runs locally where it can. Speech-to-text is Whisper on the machine. The face animates in the browser. Only the LLM call and the voice synthesis go out to the internet, and only when Dad or Connie actually say the wake word.