Meet TARS and Unbox the AD5M 3D Printer

Six months ago you uploaded a blinking light to a microcontroller. This month you finish by building a robot that walks, sees, listens, and talks back: TARS, inspired by the machine from Interstellar. It is the hardest and most rewarding thing in the whole program, and the remarkable part is that it is built almost entirely from things you already know, plus two genuinely new skills you pick up now: 3D printing and mechanical assembly.

Before anything else, it is important to be clear about where this build comes from and where you will actually do it. TARS is not a CraftingTable invention. It is a real, living open-source project built and maintained by the TARS-AI Community, a group of makers who designed the printable parts, wrote the software, and continue to improve it. They deserve the credit, and their resources are the real home of this build. This month's job is to teach you the ideas behind each stage, connect them to the five months you just finished, and get you ready. The actual step-by-step build, the current bill of materials, the printable files, the wiring, and the software, lives with them and is kept up to date by them. You will follow their guide to build, and you should join their community while you do it.

Think of these Academy lessons and the TARS-AI documentation as two halves that fit together. Their docs tell you exactly which screw goes where and which command to run; they are the authoritative, current instructions, and following them directly is how you avoid the frustration of an out-of-date copy. Our lessons tell you why each stage works, what to expect, and how it draws on everything you have built over six months, so that when you open their guide, nothing is a mystery. When their instructions and an old write-up ever disagree, theirs win: they maintain the real thing.

How TARS is the sum of your six months

The reason TARS is the right finale is that it uses nearly every skill you have collected, which means you are not starting from zero on any of it. Its brain is the Raspberry Pi 5, the same board you set up for AI vision in Month 3 and ran your smart home on in Month 4. Its limbs are driven by servos through a PCA9685 driver over I2C, the exact two-wire protocol you used to talk to smart-home devices. Its power comes from a battery stepped down through converters and wired carefully, which is the electronics, soldering, and multimeter work from Months 1 and 2. It sees with a camera and thinks and speaks with a local language model and speech engine, the AI assistant you built in Month 3. It can even control your smart home and be secured responsibly, drawing on Months 4 and 5. On top of all that, it adds the two new skills of this month. When you reach a wiring step in the TARS-AI guide and it mentions I2C or a buck converter, you will already understand it, because you did it before.

What is genuinely new: 3D printing

The one large new skill this month is 3D printing, and it is worth learning well because it unlocks far more than this one robot. A 3D printer builds a solid object by melting plastic filament and laying it down one thin layer at a time, hundreds of layers stacked into a finished part. TARS's entire body, the chassis, the hull, the legs, the arms, is printed this way, so you will run many hours of printing over the month. The next few lessons teach you how printing actually works, how to use the slicing software that turns a model into printer instructions, and how to get clean, strong parts. This is the part of the month that is genuinely ours to teach, because it is a foundational maker skill rather than something specific to TARS.

Your printer: the Flashforge Adventurer 5M