Raspberry Pi

A Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 runs the site well. The image is built for arm64, so the Pi needs a 64-bit operating system.

What you need

• Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, 2 GB of memory or more (4 GB is comfortable for large models in the 3D viewer).
• Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit), installed with Raspberry Pi Imager. In the Imager’s settings, set a host name, your user and enable SSH.
• A USB SSD or a NAS share for the models. A microSD card works for the system, but is slow for a big library and for the preview cache.

Check that the system is 64-bit:

uname -m        # must say aarch64

Install

1. Docker: follow Docker’s guide for Debian (Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian): docs.docker.com/engine/install/debian. Then sudo usermod -aG docker $USER and log in again.
2. Models: mount the USB drive (for example at /mnt/models) or use an NFS share.
3. The site: follow Docker Compose on Linux from step 2. The default user 1000:1000 is the first user on Raspberry Pi OS, so PUID/PGID usually stay as they are.

Memory

On a Pi with 2 GB, lower the cap so a huge model can’t starve the system:

.env

MEMORY_LIMIT=1200m

Models that need more than that can’t be opened in the 3D viewer, but still show their previews and download normally.

Speed

The first scan reads every file once and renders previews for STLs, which takes a while on a Pi: a few minutes per few hundred files. After that only new and changed files are read, and browsing is fast.