Introduction #
This is the penultimate post in this series. I have a feeling that we’re getting into the “very comfortable” realm for OpenClaw with the Raspberry Pi 400. This unit has 4GB of RAM and a 1.8Ghz quad-core Cortex-A72 processor.
Install Raspberry Pi OS #
As usual, I installed the 64bit Lite version of Raspberry Pi OS and booted up the Pi.
Install OpenClaw #
Follow the Raspberry Pi specific install instructions located here.
Run OpenClaw #
This time I just copied my .openclaw folder from the previous incarnation to
this new one and started the gateway.
It ran me through the onboarding after install, but I just answered “skip” to most of the questions and then reloaded the gateway. It’s up and running now and everything (except for discord) seems to be working.
Automations #
The 3 automations I setup are already running since I copied all my configuration from the previous iteration:
- Check my blog for new posts
- Check your own health daily
- Check the weather and let me know if there’s anything I should be aware of
I validated they were all working.
Discord #
I asked the OpenClaw bot if it could help me fix the Discord integration, it should already have the token and IDs, so I’m hopefull this will just work.
It wasn’t able to recreate my discord integration, I needed to create a new token. That was pretty straightforward and once I did that I was back up and running.
Updates #
I’ve had issues upgrading the system using the openclaw update command. Every
time I run it I’m unable to run openclaw afterwards. This time, I tried via
the control web interface (there was a handy link telling me a new version was
available). That’s running right now. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Well, that seems to have worked. Not sure if it’s an upstream bug that was fixed, or because I used the web interface instead of the command line, but it’s good to know that the upgrade worked. No issues upgrading.
Conclusions #
4GB of RAM seems to be the actual minimum for running a problem free instance of OpenClaw (to be fair, this is what they say right here in their docs, but I like to validate things for myself). You can get it to work on less, but you will run into some annoyances. Definitely don’t use anything older than a Pi 4.
I’ve been running OpenClaw for ~2 weeks now on this hardware and I haven’t had any issues. I’m able to install plugins/helpers and update the system w/out running into memory issues of any kind.
If you happen to only have some older Pi’s lying around, all is not lost. You can run one of many alternatives to OpenClaw (PicoClaw, PicoBot, etc) there without any issues.
Next steps #
I have one last Pi sitting around, an 8GB Rasperry Pi 4. I don’t anticipate any issues running OpenClaw there, but for completness sake, I’ll kick the tires.
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