Raspberry Pi Dashboard & Local LLM Chat

Full-stack Web Developer - Personal Project. Evolved the original Raspberry Pi Shadcn dashboard into a full Pi monitoring and local AI chat stack across three repositories. Built pi-web-app, a Next.js 15 TypeScript app combining a live system dashboard (SSE metrics every 5s for CPU per core, temperature, memory, storage, load averages, and uptime) with an integrated LLM chat UI proxied through same-origin API routes. Developed pi-chat-server, an Express service that forwards chat requests to a local Ollama instance (configurable model and base URL) with Docker and host-network deployment for Raspberry Pi. Created pi-llm-chat, a React + Vite + TypeScript chat interface with Tailwind CSS v4, streaming NDJSON replies, and shadcn-style components. Unified the experience with light/dark theming, color-coded health indicators, connection status feedback, and Docker Compose orchestration for web, API, and Ollama on resource-constrained hardware.

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Project Goals: To deliver an all-in-one Raspberry Pi control center that combines real-time hardware monitoring with on-device LLM chat, using a modular architecture (web app, chat API, and chat UI) that is easy to deploy and maintain on a Pi.
Challenges Faced: Challenges included evolving the initial dashboard into a multi-service stack, reliably streaming live host metrics and LLM responses on ARM hardware, connecting Dockerized services to loopback-bound Ollama, and keeping UI consistency across dashboard and chat without over-complicating deployment.
Solutions Implemented: Split the stack into pi-web-app (dashboard + chat shell with SSE and API proxy), pi-chat-server (Express → Ollama bridge), and pi-llm-chat (standalone streaming chat UI). Used Server-Sent Events for 5-second metric updates, NDJSON streaming for assistant replies, host-network Docker patterns for Ollama access, and Docker Compose to run the full Pi LLM experience end to end.
Technologies Used: Next.js 15, TypeScript, Express, React, Vite, Ollama, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn UI, Server-Sent Events, Docker
Date: January 2026

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