Check if a ceiling robot would work in your room
Stringman hangs a small gripper from four ceiling cables so it can reach anywhere in a room. Here's how it works, what it really costs, and a prompt that checks whether your room and computer could run one.
By Alan Brown
🤖 This robot lives on your ceiling and tidies your room.
- 🧵 It's called Stringman, built by one engineer, Nathaniel Nifong at Neufangled Robotics. Four cables run to the corners of your ceiling, and motors reel them in and out so a small gripper can move anywhere in the room, like a claw machine.
- 📷 Cameras in the corner anchors track where the gripper is. It lifts about 2 kg and drops toys and clothes into the bins you tag. Neufangled says it suits rooms roughly 3–10 m across with ceilings of 2.3–4 m.
- 🔓 It's open source (designs, firmware and software are published) and runs on your own computer on your home network, not the cloud. You teach it by driving it with a gamepad, and it learns from those demos.
- 🏠 Neufangled says it's been tested for around 1,000 hours in real homes. The DIY kit is listed at about $780–795, and an assembled version at about $1,460: nhnifong.github.io/neufangled-site-2
Context & limitations
It isn't plug-and-play yet. Neufangled says fully autonomous tidying is still being developed, assembled robots aren't on sale yet, and the AI features need a desktop PC with a strong Nvidia graphics card.
Do this yourself
Stringman has hard limits on room size, ceiling height and the computer that runs it, and they're easy to miss in a 50-second video. This prompt works through them with you before you spend anything.
Want to build this with a teacher?
Pathwise Academy runs small, hands-on AI classes in Singapore for ages 10–17 and adults.