How Formatted Chinese Runs

Back to FormattedChinese.com

FormattedChinese.com is powered by a small local setup. The website runs on a Raspberry Pi, while translation and OCR requests are handled by local Ollama models on our own GPU machine.

Local GPU machine with MSI GeForce RTX GPUs and Samsung SSD
Two RTX 5060 GPUs
Our local LLMs run here with 16GB total VRAM.
Samsung SSD
The model weights are stored here.

The local LLM box

This machine runs the local models used for translation and image text extraction. The model files live on the Samsung SSD inside the same machine. Today this beta runs on two RTX 5060 GPUs with 16GB total VRAM. If FormattedChinese.com gains traction, we plan to upgrade the hardware so we can run stronger local models.

Raspberry Pi 5 hosting the FormattedChinese.com web app
Raspberry Pi 5
The website runs here.

The website server

The Raspberry Pi serves the web app, receives your request, and sends work to the local LLM machine only when needed.

Support FormattedChinese on Ko-fi

FormattedChinese is free during beta and runs on self-hosted infrastructure. If it helps you study or work with Chinese, you can donate on Ko-fi to help cover server and GPU costs.

Donate on Ko-fi

Your content is processed for your request—not sold, not used for training.

Text and files are handled only to fulfill the job you started. Completed outputs are removed after delivery to your browser or API client. Abandoned jobs expire automatically (about 30 minutes while running; up to about 24 hours if completed but never fetched). Details: Privacy Policy.