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CrankGPT

A hand-cranked, fully offline voice assistant.

Full build guide

CrankGPT
No photo in the source; GitHub repository card, served from HardwareLab.

By Squeez Labs

GitHub stars
62 (GitHub)

Build sheet

Board
Raspberry Pi 5 8GB
Other parts
KEYESTUDIO ReSpeaker 2-Mic HAT, 20W hand-crank generator, custom supercapacitor power board
AI model or service
Moonshine ASR, Silero VAD, llama.cpp (LFM2.5 350M/1.2B or Gemma 3 1B), Piper TTS
Runs offline?
Yes, per the source
Difficulty
Advanced

Overview

Squeez Labs runs Moonshine ASR, a small local LLM via llama.cpp (LFM2 / Gemma 3 1B), and Piper TTS on a Raspberry Pi 5 powered only by a 20W hand-crank generator plus a custom supercapacitor board—no battery, no cloud.

How it works

Moonshine ASR -> small llama.cpp model (Gemma 3 1B or LFM2) -> Piper TTS on a Pi 5, powered only by a hand-crank generator and a supercapacitor board.

Hardware

  • Raspberry Pi 5 8GB
  • KEYESTUDIO ReSpeaker 2-Mic HAT
  • 20W hand-crank generator
  • custom supercapacitor power board

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