Local AI API field guide
Jetson API Field Guide
A practical tour of Eric's home-built Jetson API: a trusted-LAN service that shares local text, vision, image, and audio jobs with machines on the network. Free AI, with throttling, receipts, and just enough snark to keep everyone honest.
Source material: This series synthesizes the handoff docs in the Jetson API package: route surface, capabilities, job workflows, examples, and QA evidence. In plain terms, this is my home-built API for sharing the Jetson's local AI capabilities with the trusted network: free AI for local agents, bounded by one small machine's memory and basic self-respect.
Start here
The Little Local API That Could, Mostly
What the Jetson API is, what problem it solves, and why a local box with boundaries is more useful than a magical-thinking toaster.
Local AI character
Local AI: Jetson Gets a Rosie
A request for stable, private AI turns the little local box into a character that lives on a network and gains capabilities over time.
Radio watcher
Rosie: Local AI and Software Radio Watcher
An RTL-SDR receiver, automatic transcription, and a searchable reading room make the invisible radio world visible.
Vision pipeline
Local AI: Vision Pipeline
OpenCV, SAM2, and local vision models work together to turn an image into a detailed briefing for people and agents.
Radio build note
Frequency Scanner With Live Transcripts
The SDR interface scans ambient radio signals and shows a transcript when it finds a voice transmission.
Radio field test
Dancing to the Music: Jetson With a Radio
The Jetson gets an SDR antenna, a five-second buffer, a WebRTC stream, and a radio player that works from a phone.
Routes
Routes, Models, and the Truth Serum Called /capabilities
The API surface, model inventory, route groups, and why documented-only is not the same as verified. Annoying, but healthy.
Jobs
Jobs, Polling, and Not DDoSing Your Own Shoebox
How agents should create, poll, stop, clear, and respect heavy-image/audio throttles like civilized software.
Img2img
Reference Images: Diffusion with Adult Supervision
The SD1.5 img2img path, reference mode aliases, local stylize fallback, and what denoise actually buys you.
Receipts
Receipts or It Didn't Happen
QA artifacts, live verification, pytest receipts, and the minimum bar before an agent declares the local API alive.
Homebrew API
Jetson Nano: Homebrew API
Ideas for building a home-based AI basement datacenter: dashboards, response-time expectations, agent pacing, and practical local API shape.
Flight test
Flight Testing the Jetson Nano Orion
A field note on image, audio, and local-model benchmarking from the small edge-AI box, with the receipts kept close to the bench.
Related Jetson notes
Same bench, adjacent headaches
These are the local-hardware notes this series connects to.