Hardware Profiles

OpenCastor detects available hardware at startup and selects the appropriate execution tier.

Supported tiers

Tier ID	Hardware	TOPS	Recommended config
pi5-hailo	Raspberry Pi 5 + Hailo-8L	26	High thinking_budget, NPU inference
pi5	Raspberry Pi 5 (no NPU)	—	Moderate context_budget
pi4	Raspberry Pi 4 (4–8 GB)	—	Low cost_gate_usd, conservative limits
jetson-orin	NVIDIA Jetson Orin	275	High context_budget, local model
coral	Pi + Google Coral TPU	4	Lightweight inference, nexa_enabled
server	x86 / high-RAM	—	Full context_budget, parallel branches
generic	Any other ARM/x86	—	Conservative defaults

Auto-detection

castor status --hardware

Output:

Hardware tier:  pi5-hailo
NPU:            Hailo-8L (26 TOPS) ✓
RAM:            8 GB
Disk:           64 GB (69% used)

Research contribution by tier

The harness research pipeline matches work units to your hardware tier so results are comparable:

• pi5-hailo → evaluates NPU routing, thinking_budget impact on Hailo inference
• pi4 → evaluates cost_gate_usd floors, minimal-cloud configs
• server → evaluates parallel branch patterns, high context_budget configs

See Contributing Compute for details.