Robinson Labs / 00 · Overview

An independent AI lab that runs its own models.

Fifteen machines between a garage and an office, two NAS boxes, a custom water loop, and a 10-gigabit llama.cpp cluster running a 212B. Roughly two million tokens of live context across three brain nodes. Local inference, persistent memory, no rented GPUs. This is the build log.

15×
Nodes online
~2M
Tokens of context
212B
Largest model served
10GbE
Cluster fabric
00.1 · Outcomes
DELIVERABLES · AS OF 01.07.26
12,810
Model downloads, last 30 days
9
Open models on Hugging Face
94%
Merged PRs agent-authored
360 of 384 merges across 14 own-org repos. Every merge human-reviewed.
How these are counted

Downloads are Hugging Face rolling 30-day totals across published Robinson Labs models, a public counter we do not control. A merge is agent-authored when the PR body carries the Generated-with-Claude-Code trailer left by the pr-architect flow. Counts cover Robinson Labs own-org repositories only, and every merge is human-reviewed before it lands, so an agent opens the PR but a person makes the call. Numbers refresh at deploy time.

01 · Cluster

Two constellations, one sky.

FIG. 01 · 15 HOSTS · 10GbE FABRIC
ORION// NVIDIA RPC CLUSTER · 110GB · 10GbEBetelgeusecuda worker · shoulderBellatrixcuda worker · shoulderMintakacuda workerAlnilamcoordinator · brightestAlnitakcuda workerSaiphopen slotRigelutility · Orion's footVELA · THE SAILS// AMD INFERENCE FLEET · RDNA · Vulkan/ROCmRegorimage-gen · 4-card burstSuhailvision summarizerMarkebinstruct · JSONAlsephinahermes brain
Green = NVIDIA (Orion)
Red = AMD (Vela)
Brightness = health / load
Lines = RPC / topology
Dim = open / offline slot

Orion NVIDIA

the hunter · RPC serving cluster
Rigelutility · Orion's foot
Alnilamcoordinator (brightest belt)
Alnitak · Mintakabelt · cuda workers
Betelgeuse · Bellatrixshoulders · cuda workers
Saiphopen slot (future node)

Vela AMD

the sails · inference fleet
Regorimage-gen · 4-card burst
Suhailvision summarizer
Markebinstruct · structured JSON
Alsephinahermes brain

★ per-node star assignments are illustrative, firm names land at each rebuild (DEC #555). Constellation names are locked.

FIG.01-AUTILITY · AGENT
Rigel
Utility + agent brain — now serving the custom 88B (REAP-30). Dual RTX 3090 on a custom water loop. 256K × 2 context.
48GBWin 11
FIG.01-BORION
orion cluster
The NVIDIA RPC constellation — five-node pool on 10GbE. Serves the 212B at 256K × 4, a million tokens of context on its own.
110GBUbuntu
FIG.01-CUTILITY · AGENT
Alsephina
Utility + agent brain, now serving the custom 35B. 3× RX 5700 XT on Vulkan. 128K × 3 context.
24GBUbuntu
FIG.01-DFLEET
Pleiades
10× Pascal cards. Embed / rerank fleet plus the Whisper STT lane.
~94GBUbuntu
FIG.01-EVISION
Suhail
4× RX 5700 XT on Vulkan. Vision summarizer, Qwen3-VL-30B.
32GBUbuntu
FIG.01-FIMAGE-GEN
Regor
SDXL + Lightning on sd.cpp/Vulkan, ControlNet driven from Rigel. 4 images per pass, ~17s a pass.
4×8GBUbuntu
FIG.01-GINSTRUCT
Markeb
Structured-JSON lane — 2× Qwythos-9B pool, one per card. Clean JSON, clean tool calls.
16GBUbuntu
FIG.01-HSTORAGE
Altair · Deneb
Two-NAS topology. Media archive, model library, and the dual-Xeon build host.
2× NASunRAID
FIG.01-IAGENT · A/B
Vela
Twin boxes, 3× RX 5700 XT each on Vulkan. The next two 35B agent-brain lanes — candidate A/B eval in flight.
2× 24GBUbuntu
02 · Models in production

Three brains, one fleet.

~2M TOKENS LIVE CONTEXT · SERVED LOCALLY
Rigel · utility / agent
Qwen3.5-88B
rldomain fit quant · REAP-30 of 122B · dual-3090
custom quant · attention → Q6
512K256K × 2 CTX
Orion cluster · deep
Qwen3.5-REAP-212B-A17B
attn-priority fit quant · 81GB · 18.6 tok/s
abliterated · REAP of 397B
1M256K × 4 CTX
Alsephina · utility / agent
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
IQ4_XS · imatrix · rldomain · fast MoE
custom domain quant
384K128K × 3 CTX
Markeb · instruct
Qwythos-9B × 2
Q4_K_M · rldomain imatrix · clean JSON + tools
~107TOK/S POOLED
Suhail · vision
Qwen3-VL-30B
Q4_K_S · image describe
30BMOE VISION
Regor · image-gen
SDXL + Lightning
fp16-fix VAE · ControlNet · 49 LoRAs
17sPER PASS · 4 IMG
Voice · STT + TTS
Whisper Large v3 · Kokoro · Piper
STT + dual TTS lane
3VOICE LANES
Pleiades · retrieval
Qwen3-Embedding · Qwen3-Reranker
4B + 0.6B each · Q8 embed / Q4_K_M rerank · cortex-lb
4EMBED + RERANK
Models on Hugging Face ↗
03 · What it runs

The work on top of the metal.

NAMES ABSTRACTED · PRE-RELEASE
W/01
Distributed AI platform
Agents, tools, chat: the spine everything else plugs into.
Active
W/02
TCG collection assistant
Singles, sealed + graded subsystem, open-a-box as an atomic transaction.
Active
W/03
Crafting assistant
AI-assisted CRUD for a real working maker. Daily-driven.
Active
W/04
Persistent memory + kanban
The lab's long-term memory: decisions, facts, work items across every project.
Active
W/05
Model-manufacturing pipeline
Abliterate, prune, distill, quantize, with a provenance DB behind it.
Active
W/06
PC-build configurator
Live GPU scraping + a multi-pass enrichment pipeline.
Active
W/07
Agentic social platform
Early build. Agent-driven content workflow.
Early
W/08
ServiceNow MCP + agentic SDK
A large MCP tool surface plus an SDK-native agentic layer. Personal capability-build.
Parked
04 · Writing

What we ship, we write down.

ENGINEERING JOURNAL · WAR STORIES
All writing →
05 · About

A one-person lab with a real cluster.

INDEPENDENT · SELF-FUNDED · NC

Robinson Labs is the homelab of Stephen Robinson, a ServiceNow architect in Charlotte, NC who got tired of renting intelligence. By day I design enterprise platforms; by night I run a local-first AI operating system on hardware I own.

The bet is simple: own your models, your memory, and your tools. Local inference, persistent memory across sessions, agentic tooling that does real work, no rented GPUs, no API key on the critical path. The interesting problems live in the wiring, not the billing.

Right now the cluster is a pile of PCs under my desk; tomorrow it moves to the garage when the last 10-gig SFP+ lands. This is where I write down what I learn building it: the dead ends, the BIOS resets, the "nothing changed but everything broke" nights.

More about the lab →Email →

LocationCharlotte, NC
Nodes15
Cluster VRAM~110 GB
Fabric10 GbE SFP+
Live context~2M tokens
StorageTwo-NAS · unRAID
Stackllama.cpp · Vulkan · ROCm
RuleLean. No bloat.