An important part of this project, the solar panel couldn’t travel with me to the Netherlands. The cost of buying a panel of the same wattage in Netherlands is about 5 times. But I found something very exciting about the dutch urge to drop everything and head out if the sun shines bright! Where we live is fairly suburban, our amazing retired neighbours and their zeal for making the most of the sunny days made me reconsider the solar server as a portable artefact.

The idea now wanted to “touch grass”! This meant that:

• one could make the AI server portable,
• move away generic chat/screen based AI interactions

For now, I’ve started with a UPS battery and a small screen called Whisplay which includes a speaker and mic. A lot of the code is from the Whisplay Chatbot repo, with some visual and technical additions.

Why portable?

Since Sun Shines Bright is hosted on a single board computer, it’s size and lower energy usage make it such a great portable idea, and it being stuck inside a utility closet seemed limiting. I think there is nothing that could challenge the idea of a large immovable colossus of a data center than a server that can fit in my hand! :)

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 5 (16 GB)
• PiSugar Whisplay HAT (LCD 240×280, speaker, mic, RGB LED, button)
• PiSugar 3 battery
• Portable Solar Panel (60W)

Architecture

Solarbot is a portable feminist AI server built to run entirely offline on a Raspberry Pi 5. It lives on a PiSugar Whisplay HAT — a compact board with a 240×280 LCD screen, speaker, microphone, RGB LED, and a button — powered by a PiSugar 3 battery - which is recharged by a generic portable Solar Panel.

The stack is built with local-first open source models:

• faster-whisper for speech recognition,
• Ollama running Qwen 2.5 as the language model,
• Piper for text-to-speech, and
• Qdrant with nomic-embed-text embeddings for retrieval-augmented generation.

Code

https://github.com/computational-mama/solarbot

What could AI interactions be like for a portable AI server?

It seems that once the server leaves the closet, the chat window stops making sense. The Whisplay was an interesting and quick exploration as it has a built in button, a small screen and a mic. Can we have a conversation that fits a garden bench or a walk by the canal. What are the other speculations we can think of?

The first fine-tuning experiments didn’t give me good results, so I moved to a simple RAG setup. Now the knowledge lives in a folder of files I can read, edit and question.

Learnings

The use of a portable AI server meant that we needn’t be restricted to text based chat interfaces. We could explore voice, different screen sizes, and other combinations. At REALML 2026 Johannesburg, I was advised to have measurable energy data on the solarbot. This is now in testing along with Ying! :)