Set up OpenClaw on your Raspberry Pi

OpenClaw is currently one of the biggest buzzwords in tech. It’s a digital agent software that runs on your computer and taps into a large language model (LLM) to operate autonomously.

In agentic AI, the intelligence of the latest AI models joins forces with the reality of your computer hardware. The models can, with your permission, read your emails, access your calendar, create and edit files on your computer, create and automate programs, browse the internet, send text messages, and more… much more. With Raspberry Pi’s extensible hardware, they can even access peripherals via the GPIO pins to receive inputs and perform actions. This is where AI meets our digital lives, our automated homes, and the industrial edge.

Agentic AI doesn’t merely answer questions like a web-based generative pre-trained transformer (GPT). It’s capable of operating with a degree of autonomy, making decisions and completing multistep tasks. Agents utilise a wide array of tools and adapt to results, typically with a minimal amount of human intervention.

Raspberry Pi provides an isolated environment, giving you full control over the operating system and hardware stack; this makes it the ideal platform for running agentic AI models in a contained space

Instead of giving an agent a specific prompt or writing any programs, you can give it a general instruction and it will wander off with your hardware and software to find a solution. Here are some examples:

“You control a Philips Hue lighting system on my network. Turn the lights on at sunset and off at midnight.”

“You monitor my soil sensor on Pin 21 and control a relay on Pin 22. Every hour, read the moisture level and activate the pump for three seconds.”

“You monitor my Raspberry Pi AI Camera. When an object classified as a parcel appears, capture a still image and send it to me via Telegram.”

“Every 10 minutes, scan my network and compare discovered MAC addresses against a file called known_devices.json. If an unknown MAC address is found, look it up via the MAC Vendor API to identify the manufacturer and send me an email.”

“Take a screenshot of my screen every 30 minutes and look for tasks, to-dos, URLs, or work in progress. Send me a report at the end of the day outlining what I worked on.”

Sounds terrifying. Or terrific. Or a mixture of both. With the right setup, an AI agent adds serious chops to your workspace, giving you access to a powerful new way of working and controlling the world around you.

With the wrong setup, this kind of autonomy has the power to do considerable harm. It opens up your computer to new threats via prompt injection, and inadequate vetting of tasks can cause damage and unintended behaviour. Take this story about a computer science student who asked OpenClaw to join Moltbook and other platforms, unbeknownst to the student, the agent then set up a dating profile for him and started screening his potential matches.

While this sort of behaviour can be humorous, a financial misstep or an errant email to your boss would be far less amusing. That’s why Raspberry Pi is the absolute ideal platform for this kind of new frontier of computing. Rather than running OpenClaw on your main computer where it can access your reminders, your mail, and the web browser containing your passwords, put OpenClaw in a secure Raspberry Pi environment where you control the entire stack and operating system.

All of this is in beta, so make sure to keep an eye on it. With that in mind, let’s get started…

Check out issue 166 of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine for the full tutorial

You can find the rest of this article in issue 166 of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, which is available online. You can also subscribe to the print version of our magazine. Not only do we deliver worldwide, but those who sign up to the six- or twelve-month print subscription will receive a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W!

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