Developer Revives Discontinued Anki Vector Robot Using Raspberry Pi and Local AI

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A developer has restored his son's Anki Vector robot — originally purchased in 2019 — by replacing its defunct cloud backend with a self-hosted setup. After Anki went out of business, the robot lost many of its core features despite its hardware remaining fully functional. Using a Raspberry Pi, the open-source WirePod server software, and Google's Gemma 4 12B language model running locally via Ollama, the developer rebuilt Vector's entire backend infrastructure at home. WirePod now acts as a replacement for the original cloud servers, routing the robot's requests to the locally hosted AI model. The project demonstrates how open-source tools and modern large language models can extend the life of smart hardware that would otherwise be rendered obsolete by a company's closure.

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