PicoBot on a Raspberry Pi 3b+

You don't need a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw - This article is part of a series.

Part 1: You don't need a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw

Part 4: This Article

This post is another side quest in the “You Don’t Need a Mac Mini to run OpenClaw” series.

When I was first looking for alternatives to OpenClaw, I ran across the PicoBot project and bookmarked it for later. While I was struggling to get OpenClaw up and running on my Pi 3b+ I found PicoClaw, which I confused for PicoBot as both projects are written in Go and both aim to be small Ai assistants that can run on limited hardware. In my first draft of my last post I even swapped the names on more than one occasion.

When I realized I was installing PicoClaw, and not PicoBot I decided to just keep going and come back to PicoBot at a later time. That time is now.

Installation
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I kept the same Raspberry Pi OS Lite install that I used for OpenClaw, and PicoClaw. For now I’ll leave the PicoClaw gateway running and see if the Pi can handle the two projects running at the same time side by side.

PicoBot requires Go as well, but since we already installed it for PicoClaw, we could just follow the guide directly.

I followed the install guide in PicoBot’s documentation:

go build -o picobot ./cmd/picobot
./picobot onboard                     # creates ~/.picobot config + workspace
./picobot agent -m "Hello!"           # single-shot query
./picobot channels login              # login to channels (Telegram, Discord,
Slack, WhatsApp)
./picobot gateway

This worked pretty well, but I need to tweak the configs to get an LLM (OpenAI’s GPT-5.4) working.

Once I had it working I accidentally ran onboard again and it erased my configs! Ooops.

After re-setting it up I ran picobot channels login entered my discord bot token, and was up and running.

Usage
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I setup the 3 crons I’ve setup on my previous posts

Check my website and let me know when there’s a new post.
Check system health and let me know how everything looks.
Check the weather and notify me if there’s anything I should know about.

So far all three are running just fine.

Thoughts
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Picobot lacked a few of the convenience features picoclaw had (like migrating from OpenClaw), but I was able to just ask it to do that for me once it was up and running.

I asked: “Can you migrate memory and pertinent information from the picoclaw configs and directories located in /home/openclaw/.picoclaw/ ? I’ll let you decide what’s pertinent.” and it did the work. It seems to be a bit less sandboxed than PicoClaw, as PicoClaw didn’t want to do anything outside of its directory structure. I don’t think that was a physical limitation though, I think it was just specified in the SOUL.md file.

That worked fine, the bot did some work with the tools it had, lots of exec() calls and then told me what it had done. It was able to pull in all older memories and configurations and even told me I had a plain text key (for my discord bot) in the configuration that it didn’t copy. It also told me I should probably rotate that key now.