I built a NTS Radio Player for Rabbit R1 (outside of intern) and wanted to share my first impressions with the R1 and intern

creations, lam & teach mode
1

Hey everyone,

I got my R1 yesterday and unfortunately Spotify refuses to work properly on it. I tried pretty much everything: reconnecting through Rabbithole, restarting, factory reset, relogging, etc. No luck.

Since I mostly listen to NTS Radio anyway (seriously, if your into musci and you do not know it yet, check it out – its basically run by artists and the selection of music is unlike anything you hear elsewhere, no I don’t work for them haha). I decided to build a simple NTS player for the R1.

At first I tried using the Rabbit “intern” AI to create it, but honestly the experience left a pretty, to keep it mild, bad impression: The 3 included “tasks” are basically just 3 single prompts, which feels incredibly restrictive for something that’s supposed to help people experiment and build for the platform.

Paying around $30 for three prompt attempts is hard to justify. And the higher subscription tier (roughly €60/month from what I remember) feels even more disconnected from reality, especially considering:

  • generated code cannot be reviewed
  • generated code cannot be edited
  • iteration is extremely limited
  • most apps being built are actually increasing the value of the R1 ecosystem itself

That last part is important: Right now the community is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in making the device feel useful and alive.

The hardware itself is fun and charming, but let’s be honest for a second:

  • the Android based OS is still sluggish
  • speech recognition is inconsistent
  • AI responses are often inaccurate or irrelevant and not comparable to SOTA models
  • asking it about anything recent (TV shows, current events, niche topics) can go completely off the rails

So locking basic experimentation behind such aggressive pricing feels like the wrong move, especially this early in the platform’s life. Well, I get they need to make money somehow, but this is just really wrong imo.

Anyway, rant over.

I dug around a bit more and found the open-source SDK from the rabbit-hmi-oss team:

creations-sdk

That repo explains how to build and deploy R1 creations outside of Rabbithole entirely. Super useful for understanding the SDK and self-hosting deployments (I used Vercel). Not sure if there is an official SDK by Rabbit, I would love to see that tbh.

So I ended up building an NTS Radio Player for the R1.

The App

480×564 102 KB

Features

  • NTS 1 + NTS 2 live streams

  • 16 curated infinite mixtapes

    • ambient
    • house
    • jazz
    • hip-hop
    • and more

  • scroll wheel controls for volume + browsing

  • touch controls for play/pause and scrolling

  • side button for play/pause

Installation

You can install it by scanning the QR code in the repo README,

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or by running it locally with:

npm run dev

GitHub repo:

r1-nts-radio

I’m obviously not a “trusted” Rabbithole source, but the project is fully open-source if you want to inspect the code before installing anything.

Big thanks to the rabbit-hmi-oss team for making the SDK available. Honestly, seeing the community build tools outside the walled garden has been one of the more exciting parts of owning the R1 so far, but it has only been a day… so.

PS: I am just studying the Spotify API and hope to have a nice app for it soon, since it doesnt work for a lot of people currently.

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Thanks for sharing this! I dropped the “sdk” repo into openclaw and had it create a missile command clone. I know, it shows my age :roll_eyes:

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