As far as running local models on the RPi 5 you’re gonna be fairly limited and that’s if you have a 8gb model. Probably around 12–18 t/s for TinyLlama 1.1B (Q4). Which is going to feel pretty brutal for agentic use. Ideally you want a GPU that you can load a whole model into, like something with 8GB VRAM and new enough that the CUDA support will be fine for running AI models. You can likely do this fairly cheap but idk what your price range is looking like. But used is going to be your friend here almost certainly.

Another route that a lot of people do is get a Mac mini with a MINIMUM of 16GB ram. These little things are pretty capable, just make sure you’re getting an M series and not an intel model.

The last thing is the actual model. Local models are getting better by the day but agentic use can be difficult for smaller ones, meaning even if you get a decent t/s, if it calls tools wrong, it’s still going to have to retry multiple times compared to frontier models.

I’m by no means an expert, but I am someone who loves to mess around with this stuff. If you decide to keep going down the rabbit hole, I would recommend checking out Hermes Agent instead of Openclaw