AI Projects With Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi AI explained so simply a five-year-old could build a facial-recognition smart lock

By: Ben Rogan

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Forget the cloud, expensive subscriptions, and privacy policies you never read. In AI Projects with Raspberry Pi, Ben Rogan provides a no-nonsense, entirely practical guide to running real artificial intelligence completely offline on a board the size of a credit card.

Whether you want to build a voice assistant that never eavesdrops or a facial-recognition smart lock for your workshop, this book will get you there. It is designed specifically for beginners: you do not need to know how to code, how to use Linux, or how to solder components to build these machines.

Inside this guide, you will build:

• The Offline Voice Assistant: Learn how to run a language model via Ollama, speech-to-text with Whisper, and voice synthesis with Kokoro locally on a Raspberry Pi without relying on an internet connection.
• Tumble, the Sentient Washing Machine: Give your AI a 3D-printed body, a round digital face, and tactile push buttons.
• The Facial-Recognition Smart Lock: Wire a relay and a camera to create a door lock that recognizes your friends and rejects photographs, all while keeping your biometric data strictly private on your own device.
• Four Practical Everyday Machines: Repurpose your setup into a talking doorbell, a garden wildlife diary, an offline meeting transcriber, and a private research assistant that can read and answer questions about your own PDFs.

This isn't a textbook filled with abstract theory. You will learn precisely which board and power supply to buy, how quantization shrinks massive models to fit into a few gigabytes of memory, and why running AI at home is the most exciting weekend project available today.

(Note: This is an independent publication and is not affiliated with or approved by Raspberry Pi Ltd.)