What is COMSTAR
COMSTAR is a physical AI terminal — an always-on, embodied presence for a room. Not a phone app. Not a browser tab. A small screen that lives in your space, recognises who you are, and talks back.
A Raspberry Pi with a camera, mic, speaker, and HDMI panel runs continuously. When you walk into frame, CodeProject.AI detects a person and recognises your face. That identity opens an agentic-orchestration session scoped to you. You say hey comstar (or continue in a follow-up window). Speech is transcribed, the planner answers, Piper (or Ada TTS) speaks, and a live SVG emblem on the kiosk animates with the audio.
Proto Hologram proved the thesis: an embodied presence in a room is categorically different from a video call or a text box. People walk up to it. People talk to it without being prompted. But Proto is $10k–$250k of proprietary hardware running a closed OS, and you cannot put your own agent logic behind it.
COMSTAR is the open version. Commodity parts, a GPU you already own, and an orchestration engine you can rewrite.
| Not this | Because |
|---|---|
| A cloud chatbot with a pretty face | Phase 1 stays on your LAN |
| A full robot | No locomotion — presence through attention and voice |
| A dashboard of sensors | One job: be addressable in a room |
| A wrapper around ChatGPT | The brain is agentic-orchestration with MCP tools |
| Machine | Role |
|---|---|
| Raspberry Pi 4 | Thin I/O terminal — capture, wake, VAD, kiosk, playback |
| AI server (Ada) | Orchestration, vision (CPAI), preferred speech sidecars |
| Mac (dev) | Editor, bridge-dev, kiosk hot reload, fake hardware |
Details: Architecture · Hardware · Dev Loop.
Face recognition is not decoration. The userid from CodeProject.AI becomes:
x-agentic-user-name: <userid>
x-agentic-session-id: comstar-<userid>
Session memory and knowledge-base scoping are therefore per person for free. An unrecognised face opens an anonymous guest session with a restricted overlay.
More: Vision & Face Enrollment · Attention Model.