Project Victor


Welcome to the project page for Project Victor. We aim to make the Anki Vector open-source!

Discord Server Google Group

About


In October of 2018, Anki released a Kickstarter-backed product called Vector. Vector is a fun, quirky little AI robot. He is one of the only robots out there that feels truly "alive". Anki seemed to be doing well, but in May of 2019, they unexpectedly went out of business, and never released any source code. They have only promised to monitor cloud operations. The robots made by Anki before Vector relied on a smartphone's CPU power, but Vector doesn't. He relies on his own CPU power... and the servers run by Anki for voice queries and registration. Without these servers, Vector will be deaf, and new Vector owners would not be able to setup their new Vector. Project Victor is a very small, but diverse group of talented developers, who have done this kind of thing before, that want to make the Anki Vector function without these servers. We want each owner to host their own server on a Jetson Nano (maybe even a Raspberry Pi). We want to rebuild him as 100% open-source, so the community can make their own updates for him.


Updates


CURRENT: Digital Dream Labs launched a Kickstarter for the Open Source Kit for Robots, and the community raised more than $500,000 to get it released! Because of this, Project Victor will keep reverse engineering him, but we will be keeping the hacking toned down a bit. We now have Dev Vectors that we have full control of; these will help us in our goals.

Archive:


Frequently Asked Questions


Who are you?

We are a diverse group of developers who aim to make Vector open-source.

What is your progress?

You can never put an ETA on hacking something. We aren't there yet, but we are closing in.

Why do we need this when there is an SDK?

The SDK uses set endpoints, and doesn't give you full control of Vector. You can't even save your own scripts to Vector. We aim to give you full control of your Vector.

Are you going to hack into Anki's servers and hack all of our Vectors?

No. We aren't interested in your personal information, and this is going to be opt-in.

How do you plan to deliver the payload?

We plan to make an Android and/or Windows app (apple wouldn't allow this) that injects the payload into Vector. (Put IP in, maybe a few other details, then let it run)

I have an issue with my Vector. May you help me?

If you have an issue, join the Discord server and ask in the cooresponding text channels.

Why the name "Project Victor"?

We were scouring the internet for Vector showcase videos, and found the codename "vic" and "victor" several times. We assumed this was his codename, so we set it as our name.