Give an AI a Body (PiDog)
A PiDog robot dog wired to an LLM brain with local vision.

By rockywuest
- Posted
- GitHub stars
- 22 (GitHub)
Build sheet
- Board
- Raspberry Pi 5 brain
- Other parts
- SunFounder PiDog (Pi 4 body)
- AI model or service
- Any LLM (OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama) + SmolVLM-256M via llama.cpp
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
Overview
An open framework links an AI brain on a Pi 5 or any computer to a SunFounder PiDog body over HTTP, with on-device SmolVLM-256M vision, face recognition, faster-whisper voice and Telegram control; it began when the owner's agent SSH'd into the dog unprompted to look through its camera.
How it works
An AI brain on a Pi 5 or any computer drives a SunFounder PiDog over HTTP, with SmolVLM-256M vision, face recognition, faster-whisper voice and Telegram control.
Hardware
- SunFounder PiDog (Pi 4 body)
- Raspberry Pi 5 brain
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