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
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!
+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.
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!
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.
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
Reminds me of Mike Neil's FishHack at the 2000 MacHack. https://tidbits.com/2000/07/03/the-machax-best-hack-contest-...
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
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!
+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.
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!
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.
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
> 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.
I love that you put the Amazon Shopping list in the readme.md. Hacking this together is not intuitive
Yes I agree! not intuitive at all. I tried to lay out everything I did so someone could easily recreate it.
we need more people like you. kudos
What a great name for a project
:)
Get a proper wire stripper! Don't strip wires with a diagonal cutter.
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