That’s awesome! Billy bass has always been a fave for this sort of thing I found a couple of guides that were similar to mine when I was working on it too
mtw14 4 hours ago [-]
I built BillAI Bass just because I could. It’s powered by a Raspberry Pi and Strands Agents with bidirectional streaming, and the repo includes the code and hardware setup. Happy to answer questions about the implementation!
4 hours ago [-]
reactordev 2 hours ago [-]
+10 points for giving it context that it's nailed to a plaque. -10 points for using Amazon Bedrock instead of a local conversational model that can run on the Pi without a subscription fee.
Replace the bedrock setup for a gemma-4 E2B one.
mtw14 1 hours ago [-]
You can actually run a local model with strands using Ollama pretty easily so you could just swap the model provider out in like 4 lines of code. So this would not be hard to do. Good idea!
ryandrake 4 minutes ago [-]
Yea, I like the idea of hooking this up to a local model running on my homelab and having no external calls. This project seems to provide a pretty good hackable foundation! I also wonder if it can be done with something smaller form-factor like a raspberry pi zero so it can be fully encased in the Bass plaque. This is a site to bookmark for later!
dinkleberg 3 hours ago [-]
This is great! I remember the commercials for these things as a kid. Imagine telling that kid that in the future Billy Bass will have the world's collective knowledge and you'll be able to talk to him about anything.
mtw14 3 hours ago [-]
Yess a nice dose of nostalgia. I want to download the original songs so he can still sing those too and just load them up as audio files it can play. I had it reading the news and giving me a summary but it just ultimately was too silly for that use case lol
dylan604 2 hours ago [-]
> was too silly for that use case lol
I don't know, some of the news today is so preposterous that it could only be delivered by a BillyBass.
zuckerborg0101 3 hours ago [-]
I love that you put the Amazon Shopping list in the readme.md. Hacking this together is not intuitive
mtw14 3 hours ago [-]
Yes I agree! not intuitive at all. I tried to lay out everything I did so someone could easily recreate it.
swyx 2 hours ago [-]
we need more people like you. kudos
trevoragilbert 3 hours ago [-]
What a great name for a project
mtw14 3 hours ago [-]
:)
fortran77 1 hours ago [-]
Get a proper wire stripper! Don't strip wires with a diagonal cutter.
mtw14 53 minutes ago [-]
Hahaha it was my first time!!! I am but a mere software person. You wouldn’t want to see my soldering joints… it wasn’t pretty but it got the job done
Rendered at 22:22:42 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Replace the bedrock setup for a gemma-4 E2B one.
I don't know, some of the news today is so preposterous that it could only be delivered by a BillyBass.