In my first post of this series I installed OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi 3b+. It didn’t go too well, but I mentioned that I wanted to see if one of the other less resource-hungry Claws could run on it.
I kept the same Raspberry Pi OS Lite install that I used for OpenClaw, but disabled the OpenClaw gateway since it was eating up all my RAM. Then I needed to install Go:
sudo apt install golang
Then follow the install docs:
# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/sipeed/picoclaw.git
cd picoclaw
# Install dependencies
make deps
# Build for your platform
make build
# Build and install globally
make install
PicoClaw has a handy “migrate” command that let me pull in all the memories, configuration etc from the OpenClaw setup I just did:
picoclaw migrate
I tried to send PicoClaw a message, and it just worked:
$ picoclaw agent -m "Hello!"
🦞 Hey gabe! 👋
Got your message loud and clear!
I'm PicoClaw, up and running on your little arm64 box. What can I do for you?
I had to do a bit more config editing to get PicoClaw’s tools up and running, I
needed to set the ones I wanted to use to "enabled"=true in the config.json,
but that may be a side effect of the migrate command, I’m not sure.
I setup the same 3 tests on PicoClaw that I had on OpenClaw:
-
Check my blog for new articles, and let me know when they’re available.
-
Run a daily health check on itself to see how it’s doing (CPU, Storage, RAM, etc).
-
Check the weather in the morning and let me know if there’s anything I should know about.
I ran into a few bugs setting those up, but PicoClaw helped me find and fix the errors. They seem to be working just fine now.
I was also able to get the Discord integration working w/out issues.
Where OpenClaw struggled on this hardware, PicoClaw shines. Even compiling it from source didn’t lead to any memory exhaustion and running the gateway only uses up about 20MB of RAM.
It’s not a 1:1 replacement for OpenClaw but if you’re working with limited hardware it looks like a good alternative.
$ picoclaw status
██████╗ ██╗ ██████╗ ██████╗ ██████╗██╗ █████╗ ██╗ ██╗
██╔══██╗██║██╔════╝██╔═══██╗██╔════╝██║ ██╔══██╗██║ ██║
██████╔╝██║██║ ██║ ██║██║ ██║ ███████║██║ █╗ ██║
██╔═══╝ ██║██║ ██║ ██║██║ ██║ ██╔══██║██║███╗██║
██║ ██║╚██████╗╚██████╔╝╚██████╗███████╗██║ ██║╚███╔███╔╝
╚═╝ ╚═╝ ╚═════╝ ╚═════╝ ╚═════╝╚══════╝╚═╝ ╚═╝ ╚══╝╚══╝
🦞 picoclaw Status
Version: nightly-19-gc513ad2 (git: c513ad22)
Build: 2026-03-16T19:49:39+0000
Config: /home/openclaw/.picoclaw/config.json ✓
Workspace: /home/openclaw/.picoclaw/workspace ✓
Model: kimi-k2.5