Goli: A 3D-Printable Desk Robot That Rings a Bell When Your Infrastructure Drifts

Every project needs a mascot. Goliash got one: a small desk robot named Goli. He has a round AMOLED face that animates — tired eyes during quiet periods, a surprised expression when a notification arrives, alarmed when something critical happens. When an alert fires, he dings a physical bell on his head. He runs on an ESP32-S3 and you can print him yourself.

What Goli is

Goli (github.com/pipozzz/goli-bot, pipozzz.github.io/goli-bot) is a 3D-printable desk robot that connects to Goliash and rings a physical bell when something in your infrastructure needs attention. His whole face is a 466×466 round AMOLED display with an ESP32-S3 behind it, so the eyes, brows and mouth are fully animated and respond to what's happening.

He is about 108 × 65 × 150 mm with the bell on. Every part fits a Bambu Lab A1 mini. The firmware installs from a browser over USB-C — no tools needed.

The face

Goli's default state is tired: heavy lids, worried brows, wavy mouth. He blinks and glances around. When a Goliash notification arrives, he dings the bell, shows a surprised face, a count badge, and scrolls the title under his mouth. Something critical — agent gone quiet, vulnerability, production drift — gets a double ding, an alarmed face, and a red badge. Good news gets a chirp and a happy face.

He also responds to touch and motion. Tap his face: surprised then happy with blushing cheeks. Double tap: wink. Five quick taps: setup mode with a QR code. Pet his face (finger resting still): blissful closed eyes. Tilt him: pupils roll with the tilt. Shake him: dizzy with spinning pupils and a wobbly sound. Pick him up: surprised. After one minute idle he gets drowsy; after five minutes the screen dims and he sleeps with a yawn and breathing animation.

The whole face drifts a few pixels over time so the AMOLED doesn't burn in.

The hardware

One main board does everything: the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75. It combines the 466×466 round AMOLED with touch, an ESP32-S3, IMU, mic, speaker amp, LiPo charger and RTC on one unit. Add a small speaker (8Ω 1W, about 20×30 mm), a handful of M2 screws, and optionally a 3.7V LiPo.

The sounds are all synthesized — no audio files. The bell sound is a few inharmonic partials with different decays, modeled after a real brass desk bell. Critical alerts ring twice, a tone lower. All the other sounds (boop, chirp, wobble, yawn) are synthesized too. The speaker amp only powers on while a sound plays.

During quiet hours (22:00 to 07:00 by default, configurable) alerts are silent and only the badge appears.

Printing Goli

The multi-colour body is one object with three parts: blue body, cream belly, red accents. Open stl/goli_body_multicolor.3mf in Bambu Studio, map the three filaments to your AMS slots, and print. About 17 hours, 150 g blue / 58 g cream / 13 g red PLA, purging included.

The inside of the body is designed to print without supports — the roof is a 45° cone, and the face socket and screw bosses have 45° undersides. The bell and mug print at 0.12 mm layers; everything else at 0.2 mm.

Status: designed and checked in CAD, not printed yet. Print the bezel and bracket first (about 20 min) and test-fit them on the display before you print the body.

Firmware

Install from your browser: open pipozzz.github.io/goli-bot/ in Chrome or Edge, plug the board in over USB-C, and click Install. No tools, no IDE, no Python environment needed.

Once Goli is on Wi-Fi he updates himself: once a day he checks ota.json from the installer site, downloads any new release, and restarts. The download only comes from a server with a trusted certificate, and the ESP32 checks the image before booting it.

To build the firmware yourself: it's a PlatformIO project using Arduino core 3, LVGL 8.4, the CO5300 display driver, SensorLib for touch and IMU, Espressif's ES8311 codec driver, and ArduinoJson.

Connecting to Goliash

Create a read-only token in Goliash: goliash token create -name goli-bot -role viewer. On first start, Goli opens a setup hotspot and shows a QR code — scan it, enter your Wi-Fi credentials, Goliash address and token, and tap Save.

Every 30 seconds Goli polls GET /api/v1/notifications/sent?since=... — the same list the bell in the Goliash UI shows. Each new message rings once. The first poll after power-on only learns the current state, so he doesn't ring for old news.

The design files

The body shape is generated by a Python script (goli_bot.py) from the Bézier path of the Goli artwork — change the constants at the top to scale, tilt the face, adjust depth, or adapt the fit for a different display. Run the script to regenerate all STLs and the assembly viewer.

There is also a 3D viewer at pipozzz.github.io/goli-bot/viewer.html with an exploded-assembly slider so you can see how everything fits together before printing.

License

Firmware, web installer, CI, and Python tools: MIT. The 3D model, the Goli character, renders and artwork: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Print and remix Goli for non-commercial use — credit "Goli desk bot by Peter Gonda" with a link to the repo and share remixes under the same license. Selling prints or remixes needs written permission.

My take

Goli started as a character sketch for Goliash and ended up as a full hardware project. The appeal is simple: infrastructure monitoring usually lives in a browser tab or a Slack channel. A physical object on your desk that rings a bell when something drifts or goes wrong is a fundamentally different thing — it's ambient, it's present, it's harder to ignore. The AMOLED face and the synthesized sounds make it feel like an actual character rather than just a notification light.

The design is open: print it, remix it, adapt the firmware. The Python-generated body means the proportions are easy to change without touching a CAD tool. And the browser-based firmware install means getting it running is genuinely a five-minute job once the hardware arrives.