Recently, I decided to jump on the latest AI bandwagon and play around with OpenClaw. While cloud-based large language models are powerful and convenient, I wanted complete control over my data, plus the satisfaction of running everything on my own infrastructure. Enter OpenClaw — a personal AI assistant that runs locally and integrates with messaging platforms you already use.

The challenge I set myself was to see how much I could do without actually spending anything. This left me with a few choices to try:

As I have mentioned previously I have been been gradually Home Assistant-ifying my home. Of course, part of that means having a some control panels around. I have tried an old tablet, but was not really happy with the results. At some point I leaned about the so-called “Cheap Yellow Display” (CYD). This is a small TFT display bolted directly to an ESP32 microcontroller.

There are a few things that make this interesting:

I have a few posts in my mind that will need me to include bible passages in the pages. I could just quote them, but that is no fun and I am happy make a lot of effort to be lazy.

I am using Hugo to power this site, so I decided I would add a shortcode that would allow me to do it via an API. There are a few decisions to be made first.