On a $1000 hacker project that's only a 2% percent cost increase.

I’m sure the Arduino isn’t the only thing you’d save money on with this approach. Keeping the same ratios, it’s a 600% cost increase.

Not every project costs $1000. In fact, most arduino project i saw cost less than $200 in BOM.

In most of the world $1000 is startup capital, not a hobby project

Regardless of where you live - you're not building a household robot for much less than that.

This isn’t a household robot. It’s barely a robot at all. It can’t move itself. It can pivot its head and move its “arms “ on one axis, but it can’t manipulate anything at all.

It’s a poorly made “AI” camera without decent audio with two fake arms that can kind of gesticulate but not do anything, that looks like a much cooler robot than it is.

This can be built with a a BOM cost of around $30 total, plus 3d printing filament. I know because one of the things we are building actually has a similar processor with an npu as well as an esp32 with wifi/BT and mcu functionality, SD card, camera, 9dof gyro/mag, barometric sensor, mic, audio amplifier and speaker, as well as a 1500 pixel SPAD sensor. Cheap servos are $3 each.

Actually to build this and get image recognition you could just use a esp32-p4/c6 module and run it in python without Linux, BOM cost more like $20