Building an LLM Robot with My Son — EP 6. Connecting the Robot to the LLM Server over LAN
Building an LLM Robot with My Son — EP 6. Connecting the Robot to the LLM Server over LAN The robot needed to talk to the LLM server. Until now the robot ran standalone — HC-SR04 measuring distance, motors responding to code. That works for basic behavior. But the whole point of this project is an LLM that makes decisions. The robot sends camera frames and sensor data to the LLM server, the LLM decides what to do, the command comes back. That communication layer had to be built. This episode is about how robot (edge) ↔ LLM server (Mac) gets connected. Three Options WebSocket : bidirectional real-time communication. Simple to implement, HTTP-based so firewall issues are minimal. Works well for a setup where the robot streams data and the server streams commands back. gRPC : Google's RPC framework. Protocol Buffers serialization means smaller payloads than WebSocket. Type safety and streaming support are both there. But setup is heavier — Protobuf schemas need to be maintained...