Hacker News

Show HN: BillAI Bass, an AI-Powered Big Mouth Billy Bass Using Strands Agents

35 points by mtw14 4 hours ago | 15 comments

relium 3 hours ago

Reminds me of Mike Neil's FishHack at the 2000 MacHack. https://tidbits.com/2000/07/03/the-machax-best-hack-contest-...

mtw14 3 hours ago

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!

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 50 minutes 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!

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

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.

trevoragilbert 3 hours ago

What a great name for a project

mtw14 3 hours ago

fortran77 43 minutes ago

Get a proper wire stripper! Don't strip wires with a diagonal cutter.

mtw14 17 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