Welcome to AI Step-by-Step

Getting started with AI is simple and can be free. The following lab guides act as a starting point for people who want to build their own environment rather than jumping straight into a chat prompt. There will be lab options that are free, then up to ~$1000, then up to a few thousand dollars.

These are Community contributed labs. If you see any opportunities for improvement or errors, please contribute with a Pull Request or notify the Lab Author.

Lab Guides

Basic infrastructure

• Text focused labs
  • Running your first model locally with Ollama
    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • Create a custom model
  • Running Daniel Miessler's fabric framework
    • Configuring your environment
    • Using existing patterns
    • Creating your own pattern
  • Open WebUI front end
    • Add OpenAI models to your Open WebUI via API key
    • Connect a local Ollama instance to your Open WebUI
• Audio focused labs
  • Transcribe an audio file
  • Voice generation
• Image focused labs
  • Diffusion server
  • Computer vision model with laptop webcam
    • Facial Recognition
    • Object Recognition
  • Add object detection to your security camera with Frigate
• Agentic focused labs
  • Agentic platforms
    • n8n
      • Installing n8n
    • Flowise
      • Installing Flowise

Community hardware builds

Need ideas for what your home lab could look like? Want to confirm compatible parts? Here are labs of our Community members.

• Buu Lam

Raspberri Pi case

Are you running a lab that uses a Raspberry Pi 5 and it needs a home?

Check out this design for a case: pi-case

Additional learning resources

• F5's solutions offer tremendous value once you have learned how to build AI. Here are some labs that introduce those solutions. Secure deliver optimize GenAI

• Here are some more labs we've come across. PR's are welcome!

Contributors