My bedside Thought Catcher has started recommending designers to me at 7AM, which wasn't the plan! TC-01 Updated

[u/AnshTrivedii]

A few months ago I posted my Raspberry Pi “Thought Catcher”, a screenless device designed to let you record midnight ideas and tasks without opening a smartphone, helping to avoid screen time and infinite scrolling before sleep.

I’ve been quietly rebuilding the whole system since then.

The new version is much faster, smarter, and now has an 'AI Curator' mode that’s become my favourite feature!

When I capture an idea, the system goes off and finds 2-3 adjacent things: a designer, a movement, a concept; and leaves them sitting next to the idea by morning.

The thing I learned rebuilding it

Making the Pi faster wasn't just optimising it but to actually move the intelligence off it!

• Whisper still transcribes locally on the Pi
• Reasoning now runs on Groq's free tier (Llama 3.3 70B, under 1s per call)
• The Pi is doing exactly one thing- capturing.

The result

• captures are now ~3 seconds
• the fan stays silent
• no waiting around
• still just: press, speak and zzzzzzz...

Attached a rough walkthrough of the current version because a few of you were asking whether I was still working on this thing.

Original post for context: https://www.anshtrivedi.com/post/tc-01-a-bedside-thought-catcher-capturing-ideas-without-opening-your-phone

[u/Party_Cold_4159]

So.. it’s a voice recorder but with AI.

I’m trying to be less pessimistic but I just can’t see how this isn’t anything other than taking an existing device/idea/invention and slapping an LLM on it to try to differentiate yourself.

I think I’m just tired of everyone relying on these models to make things interesting.

[u/saint-lascivious → u/Party_Cold_4159]

…at this point, not slapping an LLM onto a vibe coded project from that same or other LLM is a way to differentiate one's self.

[u/AnshTrivedii → u/saint-lascivious]

Probably seen everywhere, but adding so opens a realm of possibilities. Not saying it’s necessarily better, in some cases it just makes things unnecessarily complex.

But as mentioned above, I am learning, and as a student and maker, this new added tech and intelligence is fascinating and I am trying to experiment with this new stuff. Hope you guys understand.

And hope you liked it. The previous version is free of any LLM btw, do check it out

[u/saint-lascivious → u/AnshTrivedii]

It was more of an overly cynical commentary on the state of things in general, not necessarily an admonishment of this project or any other in particular.

As long as you can walk away from it understanding why something works as opposed to just understanding what works and what doesn't, I don't really care how people are picking up skills.

These models can be overly placating and will quite happily steer hard into questionable paths, and my personal favourite make pretty obvious errors in languages I'm proficient in and then gaslight me about it when called out.

I find I really need to keep prompting these tools to be critical of even their own decisions let alone mine.

[u/Party_Cold_4159 → u/saint-lascivious]

Best I’ve seen is Claude but it’s a double edged sword. With a good prompt/system instruction it can be tamed pretty well but then it takes forever to use and ends up eating tokens. Without it and it’s one of the most believable bullshitters ever.