Generate images in 90 seconds on a Pi5 8 or 16 GB version, no acceleration, no hats.

HI,

Long time Pi user here. 

Always loving the Pi, wishing I had this type of stuff when I was growing up rather than Z80's 6800's, and machine language, etc...

Kinda heading into retirement now, and am going to start pumping out some old stuff I've created on the Pi over the last.. since ~2012 ? via my site and GIthub.

I'm here to announce something Ive been working on recently for the Raspberry Pi 5 called 'LCM-LoRA Studio'.

Create a high-quality image (512x512), in 90 seconds, using just a low-end CPU or a Raspberry Pi 5.
Runs on Raspberry Pi 5 OS (bookworm and trixie) with only 8 GB RAM !!

For 8 GB users, SD1.5 Stable Diffusion (SD) only. 16 GB users, both SD and SDXL.
Not enough memory on an 8 GB Pi5 to load model and still make an image.

You can use the Diffusers models and Safetensors models found at Huggingface and CivitAI to generate images.

It uses a special LoRA model that gets added to the model pipeline that changes the number of steps it would take down to an average of only 4 steps. Significantly reducing the time a Raspberry Pi 5 takes to spit out a simple 512x512 image.

It will do a 1.5 minute image, even on a Raspberry Pi 5 8G version, SD only, using a BIG Class10 SD Card. 

And I mean BIG, because EVERYTHING image generation regardless of what you use for a computer, takes a lot of storage space.

You can find 'LCM-LoRA Studio' at Github: https://github.com/rock-stevens/lcm-lora-studio

I've had one running for about 10 straight days generating image after image of 'a grey kitten' (prompt), still running just fine. 

I get a new image about every 90 seconds. All on a Pi 5 8 GB running Trixie Lite 4-21-2026.

If you have not heard the CPU fan running much yet, you are going to be hearing it now ! 

About every 90 secs....

I welcome anyone interested in image generation on the Pi to check it out. 

(Runs on a PC too, CPU only)

Simple one command line install, and one command line to run.

Thanks for listening and welcome any comments.

Note: I'm over 60 and may be slow to respond to comments and messages, so just bare with me.

Later...

Rock