TLDR: You don't need a fancy Mac Mini to try out OpenClaw! I dug out an old box I built back in 2013 and was up and running in about 3 hours. My bot is called Chintu (IYKYK). However, be prepared to spend ~$100 on Claude tokens to get set up and about $20 a day even with light use because an old machine won't run local models for you. That's where a newer machine (eg: Mac Mini) with lots of RAM helps.
The setup
Might be late to the game but I spent the weekend setting up OpenClaw for Chintu on an old custom box I built back in 2013. Some details:
- Box has a 2012 vintage Core i5, integrated graphics, 8GB ram, and a 256GB Samsung SSD. So it is definitely no speed monster.
- Ubuntu LTS running as OS, OpenClaw on top
- Claude platform subscription to use Opus 4.7
- Connected to a WhatsApp channel so we can talk to each other easily
What I’ve used it for so far
Over the weekend:
- I connected Chintu to my SmartThings hub and some other home automation stuff (Ring, Govee, Lutron, Hue)
- I asked Chintu to start using Hinglish (portmanteau of Hindi+English and what a lot of us colloquially speak in north Indian cities) and the results have been most gratifying
- Had it install faster-whisper for some basic speech recognition so it can also understand when I send a voice note. Results are middling at best.
- I used Chintu to shop for outdoor furniture covers where it did quite well despite not having access to my Amazon account
What I learned
- My main learning is that you don’t necessarily need a Mac Mini to get up and running with OpenClaw however you do need a machine with lots of RAM if you want to host your own models.
- Right now, I’m using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 and the cost is already $68 for 3 days of use.
- That said, I did a lot of setup work over the past 3 days and continue to. Setting things up typically consumes more tokens and is less cache friendly work than daily use. Right now my Claude cache hit rate is 40%.
Where I hope to go next
- I want to get Chintu to talk back to me in a Delhi Hinglish accent. ElevenLabs seems to have some TTS models that fit the mold.
- I want to dig up one of my old Raspberry Pis and buy a mic hat to set Chintu up to listen and talk to me. I think someone else spoke about doing that already and it doesn’t seem super complicated.
