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Give an AI a Body (PiDog)

A PiDog robot dog wired to an LLM brain with local vision.

Full build guide

Give an AI a Body (PiDog)
No photo in the source; GitHub repository card, served from HardwareLab.

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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