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.

Cyberpunk edge AI board on a neon workbench with cables and terminal panels.

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.

Edge AI board on a neon workbench.

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.

Jetson software-defined radio interface showing a live signal spectrum.

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.

Glowing API route map feeding a small edge AI board.

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.

Glowing request cubes waiting at a job queue gate before an edge AI board.

Jobs, Polling, and Not DDoSing Your Own Shoebox

How agents should create, poll, stop, clear, and respect heavy-image/audio throttles like civilized software.

Reference image panel transforming through an edge AI board into an output panel.

Reference Images: Diffusion with Adult Supervision

The SD1.5 img2img path, reference mode aliases, local stylize fallback, and what denoise actually buys you.

QA evidence board and compact edge AI server with green check lights.

Receipts or It Didn't Happen

QA artifacts, live verification, pytest receipts, and the minimum bar before an agent declares the local API alive.

Anime-style Jetson Nano Orion device art.

Jetson Nano: Homebrew API

Ideas for building a home-based AI basement datacenter: dashboards, response-time expectations, agent pacing, and practical local API shape.

Generated Jetson Nano Orion device art used as the post cover.

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.

Learning by Osmosis on the Jetson Nano

A rainy-day local-hardware field note on pushing useful learning loops toward small nearby machines.

Back to Building Robots

A WIP Picar-X note with NanoPi on-board control and a Jetson-class "system2 big brain" plan.