My grandmother doesn't have a smartphone, so I built her this: a wooden frame with a Raspberry Pi 4 and four big buttons for controlling it.

The family sends photos, videos and voice notes to a Telegram group with a bot. If you reply to a photo with a voice note, the frame pairs them, so she hears you telling the story behind it. Her buttons are previous, record (hold to talk, release to send her reply to the family), listen again, and next. There's no touchscreen or menus.

She's had it for a couple of weeks and uses it every day.

Stack: Pi 4, 10.1" HDMI display with speakers, a 4G dongle so no Wi-Fi is needed, Python with pygame, ffpyplayer and python-telegram-bot, ffmpeg for video, and buttons via the gpio-key overlay.

Question: I'm thinking to open-source the code and the case design. Would anyone be interested in contributing, or in building one for their own grandparents and sharing feedback?

Let me know in the comments.

My latest Raspberry Pi project has come to life! I'm building a scrolling ticker that will eventually display sports, news, weather, flight information, an audio-based frequency spectrum display, and whatever else I can come up with and find APIs for. In the meantime, it can run a few different screensavers.

I'm sure some of you older nerds will recognize the first screen saver.