v0.1.0-rc1

quacksat v0.1.0-rc1 — release notes

2026-10-03. Italian copy: release-notes-v0.1.0-rc1.it.md.
The full list of what is in it is in CHANGELOG.md.

What this is

quacksat is the Microduck's voice satellite: it runs on the duck, listens
for its wake word ("hey Daffy"), and hands the conversation to Home
Assistant, to an AI agent behind a bridge, or straight to OpenAI-dialect
speech and language endpoints — and gives that conversation the duck's
body: its moves, its head, its sounds and skills through robotd, and,
through the navigation daemon quack-navd, the places of the house.

This is the first release candidate: what five weeks of work left,
packaged so it installs on the duck from a download.

Status

• Not yet on a physical duck. The duck arrives in December 2026;
  until a first session on it, nothing here has run on the RK3566.
• On development Macs, against real services: a Home Assistant
  install (the wyoming path, the full Assist round-trip), a self-hosted
  agent platform and local LLMs (the agent and direct paths), a real
  robotd — --fake, or a robot's socket forwarded over ssh — answering
  the robot tools.
• On the MuJoCo twin of the Microduck, with quack-navd: "vai in
  cucina" walked to the kitchen and the duck said so when it arrived; a
  STOP mid-way was said; the homecoming's search at boot and the
  relocalization before a journey were announced, with direct (its own
  voice) and with agent (through the bridge's say).
• The install was tried in a Debian 13 arm64 container booted with
  systemd: from the unpacked package and again from a checkout, the
  service starting under its unit's sandbox and logging what it lacks
  (no sound card, no robotd, no quack-navd). Not yet on a board.

What works

• Wake word, locally: openWakeWord-style ONNX models on tract (pure
  Rust); "hey Daffy" by default, any openWakeWord model by name
  (custom-wake-word.md).
• Turn-taking without echo cancellation: half-duplex playback, a
  tail of the duck's own voice thrown away, a minimum listening window,
  speech waited out to its end.
• Four backends: none (bring-up: wake and chirp), wyoming (a
  Home Assistant Assist satellite), agent (a WebSocket to a bridge,
  agent-protocol.md v1.1), direct (the duck calls
  the endpoints itself, no server).
• The reference bridge in bridge/, several ducks on one bridge
  (the one that heard you best answers), and MCP: the bridge's server
  for MCP-native agents, and the duck's own in direct.
• The body: robot tools through robotd's socket as an unprivileged
  client (move, head, look, sound, skills, state, a camera frame),
  surviving a robotd restart; a thinking pose while the answer is
  computed.
• The house: quack-navd's tools spliced in when its socket answers —
  where am I, remember this place, go to the kitchen, map the house — and
  the duck says on its own how a journey ended and why it walks when
  nobody asked ([announce], Italian and English).

Install

The release carries quacksat-0.1.0-rc1-aarch64-linux.tar.gz with its
.sha256, and the bare binary quacksat-aarch64-linux with its own.
Download the package, verify it, unpack it and run
./install-on-duck.sh microduck@<duck> from your computer: see
Installing from a release and
the package's step-by-step
README-install.md. The duck needs
robotd, the robot and audio groups, alsa-utils, and the internet once
(the wake models are downloaded there: openWakeWord's pre-trained models
are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so none is packaged). The bridge is not in the
package: it runs on a server, from a checkout of the tag.

Configuration highlights

/etc/robot/quacksat.toml, installed from quacksat.example.toml only
when there is none, mode 0640 root:quacksat — it will hold API keys.

• backend: none in the example; direct needs [direct.llm],
  [direct.stt], [direct.tts] (base_url, api_key, model or voice);
  agent needs [agent] url (and a unique name per duck on a shared
  bridge); wyoming listens on [wyoming] bind (0.0.0.0:10700).
• [wake]: models_dir = "/var/lib/quacksat/models",
  model = "hey_daffy.onnx", threshold = 0.5.
• [audio]: the duck's codec, plughw:aic3104; robotd's
  audio.pet_detect must stay false (the factory default).
• [nav] socket = "/run/quack-nav/nav.sock": quack-navd's; nothing
  listening is not an error.
• [announce]: on, language "it" or "en" (empty: the STT's, then
  the bridge's, then English), journeys and own_motion.
• [direct.mcp]: off; when on, a token is mandatory.
• Every key left out takes its default; an unknown key stops the
  satellite with a message naming it.

Known limitations

• No control socket yet: quack-control, the local page for the
  duck's daemons, shows quacksat as "not available" until it exposes its
  status, its configuration and later a chat
  (todo.md).
• Announcements wait for a pause, not for the story's order: a
  sentence of the duck's own is said only between turns, so it can come
  after a late answer from the model about something that happened
  later, or before it.
• Italian puts "in" before every place: "Sono arrivata in cucina" is
  right, "in divano" is not.
• An untrusted pose alone is not said: the duck may have been moved,
  but until something moves the satellite says nothing about it.
• The wyoming backend says nothing on its own: no announcements on
  the Home Assistant path yet (HA's announce action is not wired).
• Fixed phrases: the duck's own sentences are fixed Italian or
  English phrases, not worded by the agent.
• CPU on the RK3566 is unmeasured: the wake word's budget, and the
  unit's memory caps (192M high, 256M max), are first guesses for a 1 GB
  board. The 320 ms echo tail and the [gait] trims were tuned on a
  laptop and on the twin; both are to be measured again on the duck.
• "Hey Daffy" and an Italian accent: an Italian speaker scored
  0.20–0.37 against the 0.5 threshold, where the stock hey_jarvis woke
  at once; lower the threshold or train the phrase you would say
  (custom-wake-word.md).
• robotd is pinned to daemon-v0.14.4: a newer robotd on the board
  is untested from here.

What v0.1.0 final needs

A first session on the real duck: the codec's capture and playback, the
wake word's CPU on the RK3566, the echo tail measured there, and a
conversation that walks it to the kitchen.