BMO, But Make It an AI Buddy (and It Lives in a Pi!)
In a recent post on r/raspberrypi, I took at hit of nostalgia while scrolling, u/brenpoly has created their very own BMO using a Raspberry Pi 5 a local AI, and some smooth 3D printing to make the perfect desktop friend!
What They Built (And Why It's The Perfect Maker Mashup)
At its core, this u/brenpoly transformed a Raspberry Pi 5 (16 GB) into a fully local conversational AI embodied inside a custom BMO shell inspired by the iconic Adventure Time character from some of our childhoods. Using Ollama to host local language and vision models, Gemma 3:1b for text and Moondream 2 for vision. BMO can listen, understand, respond, and even analyze photos from its Pi camera without needing to call any cloud services.
BMO is voice-activated thanks to openWakeWord, speech is transcribed with Whisper, and responses are spoken aloud through Piper TTS. Using a custom PCB and microcontroller to handle physical button inputs, turning them into keyboard commands for the Pi. All of this runs off a 3.7 V lithium battery with a UPS shield, making BMO not just smart, but truly portable.
My immediate reaction? The boldness of keeping everything local is what makes this build so special.
In a world where AI is mostly tied to cloud APIs and bandwidth-hungry services, u/brenpoly said “no thanks” and built a self-contained AI friend that lives inside a tiny, battery-powered device. That’s not just nostalgic, it’s borderline revolutionary for anyone experimenting with offline voice assistants, private AI, or embedded intelligence. Seeing BMO actually respond, listen, and interact without relying on the usual cloud stack is a huge technical and philosophical win.
Plus, integrating vision analysis, RAG web search capabilities, voice input/output, and physical buttons into a single project system is no small feat, it’s the kind of project that pushes hobbyist builds into the “serious tech” category.
What's Next?
If you’re inspired by this build (and you should be!), there are a bunch of awesome directions it could go next:
Personality & emotion engine: Adding dynamic facial expressions and nuanced voice inflection so BMO feels alive and not just responsive.
Expand tool integration: Let BMO control smart home devices, retro games, or media playback from voice alone.
Distributed AI upgrades: Allow seamless syncing with more powerful local servers so bigger models can be used only when available for enhanced responses.
Modular expansions: Add modular sensors (like distance, ambient light, or touchscreen UI) so BMO can interact in even richer ways.
Wouldn’t it be wild if we started seeing Adventure Time meet real-world AI everywhere? BMO might be just the beginning.
