Coding Horizon

This $4,000 Robot Exposes The Local AI Trap Now

Every figure this video puts on screen, chased to a primary source. Verified 2026-09-08.

Palmimo DevKit

Primary sources: the Jizai product site palmimo.dev/en, the Jizai press release on PR TIMES, 3 September 2026, and the Apache-2.0 SDK at github.com/Jizai-inc/palmimo-devkit.

Figure Value Source
Maker Jizai, Japan palmimo.dev/en
Dimensions 400 x 300 x 300 mm Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Weight approx. 2 kg Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Legs six github.com/Jizai-inc/palmimo-devkit
Degrees of freedom 21 axes, legs 3 x 6 = 18 plus neck 3 Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Actuators DYNAMIXEL XC330-M288-T x 21, 5 V Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Compute Raspberry Pi 5, 16 GB, plus a servo interface board over USB to serial at 1 Mbps Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Camera 5 MP USB camera Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Audio ReSpeaker mic array, 3 W stereo speakers Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Display 2.8 inch round touch display, 480 x 480, RP2350 Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Connectivity Wi-Fi 802.11, Bluetooth 5.0, USB Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Power DC 5 V adapter plus 27 W USB PD Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Operating system Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit Specs, palmimo.dev/en
Language Python 3.12 or newer, with a Python SDK Specs, README Quickstart
Price 598,000 yen excluding tax, which Jizai gives as approximately 3,980 US dollars Specs, palmimo.dev/en

The price is explicitly an early one. Jizai lists it as “Early price / For Early Builders / Early Partners” and footnotes it: “Prices exclude tax and are unit prices for companies and research institutions. USD figures are approximate. The offering above applies to the initial lot; terms may change for later lots.” The press release calls it an early access price with no monthly fees and a 30 day initial warranty.

The MCP tool surface

Palmimo serves its robot actions over the Model Context Protocol through palmimo_sdk.mcp, over stdio or streamable HTTP, with optional bearer token auth. The MCP server guide says any MCP speaking client can “list and call them directly”.

The complete registry is 24 tools, declared in agent/tools.py:

forward backward turn strafe creep dance body_tilt pushup wave wave_both clap bow stretch nod head_shake sleep wake_up look look_center set_face show_emoji say capture stop

Dry run

Jizai’s own term. The product site says “In dry-run mode, you can try every motion API before the robot even arrives”, and the README says “every motion computes in dry-run, with no hardware attached, before it ever reaches a servo”.

What is open

From the README section “What’s open, and what ships”:

MicroDuck

Primary sources: pollen-robotics.com/microduck and github.com/pollen-robotics/microduck. Pollen Robotics is part of Hugging Face.

Figure Value Source
Height 25 cm pollen-robotics.com/microduck
Motors 15 pollen-robotics.com/microduck
Sensing camera, LiDAR, two IMUs pollen-robotics.com/microduck
Onboard policy loop 50 Hz pollen-robotics.com/microduck
Compute Rockchip RK3566 github.com/pollen-robotics/microduck
Price 399 US dollars, introductory, before taxes and shipping pollen-robotics.com/microduck

The reinforcement learning stack is public: MuJoCo for physics, PPO for training, a sim to real recipe and an ONNX export, in microduck_rl. Pollen publishes seven policies, one per shipped move, and describes the loop as train in simulation, deploy on the robot, refine the simulation, publish the policy.

NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit

Figure Value Source
AI performance 67 INT8 TOPS, sparse. The dense figure is 33 TOPS nvidia.com, nvidia.com/en-gb
GPU 1024 core NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPU with 32 Tensor Cores nvidia.com
Memory 8 GB 128 bit LPDDR5 nvidia.com
Memory bandwidth 102 GB/s nvidia.com
CPU 6 core Arm Cortex-A78AE, 1.7 GHz nvidia.com
Power 7 W to 25 W nvidia.com
Price 399 US dollars NVIDIA Jetson FAQ

The widely repeated 249 dollar figure was the December 2024 launch price and is stale: NVIDIA raised Jetson pricing in July 2026.

Raspberry Pi AI HAT+ and Raspberry Pi 5

Figure Value Source
AI HAT+ top variant Hailo-8, 26 TOPS raspberrypi.com/products/ai-hat
AI HAT+ lower variant Hailo-8L, 13 TOPS Raspberry Pi documentation
What it is for object detection, image segmentation, pose estimation, camera post processing, robotics raspberrypi.com/products/ai-hat
AI HAT+ launch prices 70 dollars for 13 TOPS, 110 dollars for 26 TOPS Raspberry Pi announcement
Raspberry Pi 5, 16 GB 305 US dollars raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5

The 120 dollar figure for a 16 GB Pi 5 was its launch price and is stale. Raspberry Pi has run several memory driven price rises, citing “an unprecedented rise in the cost of LPDDR4 memory, thanks to competition for memory fab capacity from the AI infrastructure roll-out”.

Caveats