Building an LLM Robot with My Son — EP 7. Upgrading the Robot Brain from Arduino to Raspberry Pi
Building an LLM Robot with My Son — EP 7. Upgrading the Robot Brain from Arduino to Raspberry Pi Arduino had reached its limit. The setup from EP 6 — Arduino plus a Python bridge laptop — worked, but it meant the robot was physically tethered to a laptop by a USB cable. An "autonomous" robot on a leash felt wrong. Migrating to Pi would let the bridge and ROS2 nodes run inside the robot itself. True independence. Also, my son had been asking about this for weeks. "When does the real computer go in?" had been the recurring question. The time had come. Pi 4 vs Pi 5 vs Banana Pi Three options, one criterion: LLM doesn't run on the Pi. The Pi handles ROS2 nodes, camera pipeline, and bridge role only. Heavy inference stays on the Mac LLM server. Device Approx. price RAM USB 3.0 Thermals Notes Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB $55 4GB 2 ports Hot Widely available Raspberry Pi 5 4GB $60 4GB 2 ports Better Stock inconsistent Banana Pi M5 $45 4GB ...