I wanted a personal AI assistant that was always on, accessible from my phone, and lived on hardware I owned. Cloud chatbots are great, but they don’t have a persistent home, persistent memory, or the ability to quietly run things in the background while I’m doing something else. So I built one.

The result: a Raspberry Pi 5 sitting on my desk, running OpenClaw with Claude as the model, reachable from anywhere via Telegram. I message it like a friend, and it answers — whether I’m at my laptop, walking around, or away from home.