TongDou is a fully open-source desktop robot built around an ESP32-S3, housed in a brass chassis, and equipped with a 24 GHz radar module and an IMU for spatial awareness. The face is an OLED display. Locomotion comes from two gearmotor-driven wheels. A speaker handles pre-recorded voice lines. Design files are published on GitHub by the builder, who goes by solitary dev.
The 24 GHz radar is the detail worth pausing on. Most hobbyist robots at this scale rely on ultrasonic or IR proximity sensing. Millimeter-wave radar at this price point and footprint is not the obvious choice, and the original project page explains the reasoning behind it.
The project is explicitly positioned as a workspace companion, not a platform demo. That framing, combined with the open hardware release, makes TongDou a practical starting point for anyone building in this space. Read the full Hackaday.io project log for the hardware breakdown and build notes.
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