The official robot duck can't be bought in mainland China, so someone forked a replica the next day, and gained 1583 stars in 70 days

Why fanhao375/microduck-replica made it work

Research date 2026-11-06. Data sources: our GitHub library (repo_profile / repo_day), trendshift.io, the repo's README and git history, the local x-radar corpus, Bilibili's API (queried from a domestic office machine), and web pages from 第一财经, 什么值得买, CNBC, and others.

One line

It's a third-party domestic replica resource repo for Microduck, the ¥399 robot duck from Pollen Robotics, part of Hugging Face. The official launch was on 2026-08-27, and the repo was built the next day. It started by reverse-engineering the assembly drawings and CAD from the official simulation model, then swapped the official Dynamixel XL330 servos, which were expensive and out of stock, for domestic Feetech HD-1910 servos. It packaged purchasing, printing, assembly, flashing, calibration, and training into one Chinese-language, end-to-end path. Much of its star count came from the official launch buzz (timing). It stood out from the other replicas by starting early, having the most complete docs, and recording real-hardware verification for every step, plus a WeChat community of 15 groups.

1. Basic data

The star curve: fastest from late August to mid September (official launch + domestic replica wave), early October a single-digit daily gain, then another push from 10-22 to 10-28 (+29, +45, +35, +34), then it settles back to around 15 a day.

The second wave lined up with the official repo. pollen-robotics/microduck was at 10-22 stars on 9690, 10-24 on 10605,10-26, 12065,10-28 on 12830 (our repo), so it gained over 3000 in the days after GTC Berlin. GTC opened on 10-21, and Jensen Huang demoed 4 Microducks on stage (CNBC 2026-10-23, Business Insider 2026-10-21). Other replica repos rose at the same time: kissqy went +107 in a single day (at 10-26 stars), AI-FanGe +46 (at 10-28), LuwuDynamics +268 (at 10-24). So the second wave came from a platform event, not from anything this repo did itself.

2. Background: what Microduck is and why China is building replicas

• Launch: 2026-08-27, from Pollen Robotics (a Hugging Face subsidiary). A 25 cm bipedal robot duck with 15 servos, a camera, ToF sensing, and a beak that can grip things. Priced at $399, pre-orders, shipping before Christmas. Clem Delangue's launch post got 4.57M views and 12k likes; Thomas Wolf's post got 2.87M views (x-radar).
• Sold out fast: over $2.6M in orders within 24 hours (Thomas Wolf 2026-08-28); over ten thousand units ordered in 4 days, 4.54M dollars in sales (Yicai, citing a co-founder). Lead times then stretched to 4–6 months.
• Not sold in China: the first shipments went only to North America, the EU, the UK, Japan and South Korea, with no mainland China (SMZDM 2026-10-16). On Xianyu, resale prices reached ¥5567, with a 6-month wait (Yicai).
• Copying the official spec costs more: XL330 servos were being resold on Taobao for ¥498 each, so 15 of them cost ¥7470 (SMZDM 2026-10-16). The Radxa Zero 3W controller went from ¥135 to ¥700 (Yicai).
• The official hardware can't be printed: the official repo open-sourced the software, and the 43 STL files in microduck_rl are decimated simulation meshes that won't fit when printed. The IMU daughterboard was not open-sourced either (SMZDM 2026-09-16).

So the demand is clear: a large group in China wants to get into embodied AI, has a 3D printer, and can't wait, can't buy, or finds the original parts too expensive. They want printable structural parts, a domestic servo swap option, and software that works out of the box. This repo sits right in that gap.

3. Competitors (doing the same thing)

Summary: there are many competitors, and the niche filled up within a month. Among GitHub replica repos this one ranks third in stars, behind AI-FanGe 1704 and Luwu 1796. It isn't the loudest, but it's the earliest and has the most complete documentation.

4. Where users came from (growth tactics)

1. Spillover from the official launch (confirmed, the main driver): the repo was created the day after the official launch; the second wave rose in step with the official repo and other replica repos after GTC Berlin (10-21), see the data above.
2. Named by Chinese media (confirmed):
   • Yicai's "The Robot Duck Sparks a DIY Craze" (early September, quoting a reply from Xidi 9-04) states directly: "A third-party replica project, microduck-replica, has already appeared on GitHub, deriving assembly diagrams and a CAD assembly from the officially published simulation model."
   • SMZDM 2026-09-16 "The original is still in line, and the replica duck started walking this week" lists it as one of three replica routes, quoting a viewer: "the most complete and clearest budget replica plan I've seen so far." That day matches the single-day peak of +81 recorded by trendshift, so the timing lines up, but causation is not verified.
3. Reposts on Bilibili / YouTube / Threads (confirmed):
   • Bilibili "AMD Compute Geeks" 2026-09-03 "Pre-orders pass ten thousand… experts replicate it in seconds", with only two links in the description: the official repo and this one (2472 views).
   • YouTube repost account @LookOnThisGit 2026-09-02 posted a Short titled "3D Print Your Own Walking AI Robot Duck microduck-replica", 8.2K views.
   • Taiwanese Threads account clouds1756 2026-10-25 posted an introduction saying it's "already set up with Chinese voice control" (667 views).
4. Content from collaborators (confirmed, small volume): the author of the CAD and BOM, "Mechanical Engineer Robo", posted a 8-episode assembly series on Bilibili (starting 10-08, 2.5k–3.8k views per episode), and has accounts on Xiaohongshu and Douyin. Feetech's official Bilibili account 9-28 also posted an HD1910 debugging tutorial (1527 views).
5. WeChat group community (confirmed): the README shows the group QR code on the first screen and swaps it when it expires. It has reached group 15, at 200 people per group, roughly 2000–3000 members. This is where replicators stay and help each other, and it has also brought contributions back to the repo: the boot setup for the Radxa V1.12J board was tested by group members.
6. Author posting on X: unverified. Searches of the x-radar local corpus for fanhao375 / microduck replica each return 0 result(s). A Threads post says "the author's X link is in the comments", but no specific account was found.
7. No evidence found of paid promotion, view botting, or coverage on HN or Reddit.

5. Why it charted

1. Timing: the official 8-27 launch, and this repo created 8-28. Domestic demand for replicas exploded when the official product was "unavailable, a half-year wait, and the originals were being flipped". This repo was among the first on GitHub to give a full-robot replica path, and Yicai used it as an example when it reported on the trend.
2. Hit the bottleneck: the official STL can't be printed, and the IMU board isn't open source. This repo first reverse-engineers the geometry and fasteners from the MJCF, then delivers a modified, printable SolidWorks project (the HD-1910 horn is convex, the XL330 one is concave, and 8 mating parts were redrawn), adds three home-made PCBs (bus IMU, servo HUB, battery connector), and adds IMU firmware. These are exactly the walls open source hadn't gotten over.
3. Cost math was off: the Feetech HD-1910 runs about ¥110–123 on Taobao each, while the XL330 has been bid up to ¥498. For 15 servos, that drops the bill from over ¥7000 to roughly ¥1700–1800.
4. Built a product-grade experience: there's a flashable image; once your phone joins the duck's hotspot, you can do Wi-Fi setup, calibration, gamepad pairing, E-stop, and walking all in the web UI with no commands; software updates can be done from the web UI after install; and there's offline Chinese voice plus a web training workbench. 10-24 posted real-machine videos of standing, walking, and forward-roll getup, proving it actually runs, not just slides.
5. Frequent updates, honest logging: 441 personal commits, releases almost daily, and every release clearly marks "verified / pending acceptance." There's also a long-running official update tracker that compares each version against the official daemon. The docs folder contains superpowers/verification, suggesting heavy use of AI coding agents (the Claude Code superpowers plugin workflow) to produce docs and code, so one person plus a few colleagues could sustain this update cadence (inference).
6. Community loop: 15 WeChat groups plus two tables, "Duck contributors" and "Duck community projects," turn replicators into contributors and gather similar repos (kissqy, the LathamZ color tool, fengj4780's CNC reinforcement parts) into its own ecosystem directory.

6. What's the differentiation, and is it why it broke out?

• Versus AI-FanGe: AI-FanGe uses the original XL330 servos and got more stars from a Bilibili hit video (146k views). This repo uses domestic Feetech servos, which is much cheaper, and covers structural parts, circuit boards, images, the web control panel, and the training platform.
• Versus Lu Wu's XGO-Duck: that's a company-made alternative design with official Feetech backing. This repo is an individual replica that tracks the official 1:1 and keeps following the official software.
• Versus kissqy: both use Feetech servos. kissqy is strong on trained models; this repo is strong on mechanics, electronics, docs, and the web control panel.

The differentiation = "the earliest, most complete, hardware-verified replication resource hub for the domestic Feetech-servo 1:1, plus a Chinese web control panel and WeChat community."

That's why it ranks top three among the replica repos and keeps people around (fork/star reaches 17%, 39 open issues, 15 groups). But the main reason it got so many stars is still timing: star counts across the whole niche rode the official hype (released late August, 10-21 GTC), and this repo had no viral video of its own and never hit GitHub trending. Without Microduck selling out, there'd be no repo.

7. How many people saw it / is anyone copying it

• Visibility: it's circulating in small circles. First Financial and smzdm picked it up, and Bilibili, YouTube, and Threads have reposts, but it never reached GitHub trending, and there's no major-account discussion on X in the local corpus. The whole niche is already crowded: searching GitHub for microduck returns 616 repos, and replica videos on Bilibili are appearing in batches.
• Copies / knockoffs: kissqy/Microduck-kissqy (10-07, same Feetech HD1910 route), zhuoligetu123/microduck-hd1910m, 7757/fanduck, and fengj4780-sudo, all modified from this repo's SolidWorks drawings. Commercial ones include Bilibili's "wholesale Microduck kit debugging" (self-described 10-28 mass production), Weichuang Dongli's replica servos, and Shanmao Flashduck.

8. What to borrow

• In the window after a hot hardware launch when it can't be bought, be first to make a localized replica: domestic parts, Chinese docs, and orderable BOM links claim the "standard answer" spot first.
• Turn hardware DIY into a software-product experience: one-card flashing, a web wizard, E-stop, and in-web updates lower the barrier by a full tier.
• Honestly labeling "verified / pending acceptance" plus real-machine videos builds credibility, which is exactly what the replica scene lacks most.
• The README's first screen carries the WeChat group, with the QR code rotated weekly, and issues are used to recall people ("if it expires, open an issue and say so"), so private community and GitHub feed each other.
• AI coding agents sustain very high update and documentation density.

9. Still unclear

• Whether 9-16's peak came from the Stringers article is unverified. The first 10 days' roughly 490 stars have no confirmed source, and there is no day-by-day data.
• Whether the author promoted it through their own X or Xiaohongshu accounts is unverified. Two long Zhihu replica posts couldn't be read in full because of anti-scraping, so it's unknown whether they cite this repo.
• This repo's day-by-day numbers differ from trendshift's (different time zones or fetch times), and the peak dates don't match between the two.
• How many people actually replicated successfully using it is unknown: group sizes are estimates, and I didn't read the issues one by one (GitHub API was rate-limited at the time).
• Whether Pollen will later open shipping to mainland China, expand production and cut prices, or take a stance on replicas. Any of these would directly determine how much demand the niche has left.

Sources

• 仓库:github.com/fanhao375/microduck-replica(README、docs/历史更新.md、docs/官方更新跟踪.md、构建日志.md、git log)
• trendshift:trendshift.io/repositories/200562
• Official: pollen-robotics.com/microduck/, github.com/pollen-robotics/microduck
• CNBC 2026-09-01:www.cnbc.com/2026/09/01/hugging-faces-new-duck-robot-is-sell…
• CNBC 2026-10-23 (GTC Berlin): www.cnbc.com/2026/10/23/jensen-huang-gtc-robot-ducks-neoclou…
• First Financial: m.yicai.com/news/103350821.html
• smzdm 2026-09-16: post.m.smzdm.com/p/awwzp65g/; 2026-10-16: post.m.smzdm.com/p/ae6qnwd3/
• Threads:www.threads.com/@clouds1756/post/De7Cr3aj3bp
• YouTube Shorts:www.youtube.com/shorts/7gNXH046S7Q
• Bilibili: BV1CQtR6PEmF (AMD compute geek club, link in the profile repo), BV1uUbG6FEfb (AI Lab - Fan Ge), BV1JCaN6cEhk / BV1U2tV6xEru (ZeroTau), BV1XAHd6PEAM (kissqy), BV1RoHX68EFV (Mechanical Walker Robo), BV1Gtx76MEp3 (wholesale microduck package debugging)
• X (x-radar): ClementDelangue 2092931447644442635, Thom_Wolf 2093295950605279501, RemiFabreRobot 2093465891191042057
• Feetech HD-1910 Taobao price ¥123: www.taobao.com/list/item/YldsbldMSzdtYVIwd0FoREFnRVNjQT09.ht…; Feetech promo for XGO-Duck: www.feetechrc.com/509038.html