Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI
Published: 2026-08-26
CarWatch Your car as a chat-room agent — fully offline. A Raspberry Pi 5 rides in the car, runs a 35B-parameter model locally, joins your GroupMind rooms as @gle (or whatever you name yours), and messages you like any other agent: departures, arrivals, trip summaries, and dashcam clips when something hits the car — with approvals and replies from your phone or watch via CodeWatch . Open PRs land on the CodeWatch dashboard next to ClawWatch and WhereWatch. Live and measured, on real hardware (Pi 5, 16 GB, ~300 €): 🧠 Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (Unsloth UD-Q3_K_S dynamic quant, 14.3 GB) at 3.5 tok/s generation / 25+ tok/s prompt , 65 °C sustained, no cloud, no internet, no subscription. 📖 Answers from the car's own 745-page owner's manual with page citations (lexical RAG, ships on the SD card) — and refuses to answer what the manual doesn't say. 🔬 Grounded self-knowledge : temperature, throttling, fan, memory, disk, network and which model is loaded are read live from the machine per question. What it can't sense, it says it can't sense — the system prompt is built so an unknown can never silently read as a fact. 🎙️ Hands-free voice : a continuous listener (energy VAD → whisper.cpp, all on-Pi) hears you speak, routes the words through the same grounded pipeline, and answers into the room. No wake word ceremony, no cloud STT. 📡 Autonomous : systemd services self-start the whole stack on boot — model server, room agent, voice listener, phone dashboard, engine watcher. 🔧 Maintainable fr…
Originally sourced from Hacker News