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.

It started with Home Assistant on one Pi. Then I wanted backups that didn’t live on that Pi. Then something to tell me when the backups stopped. Four Pi 5s later, here we are.

Hardware

• 4x Pi 5, 4 GB
• NVMe boot on Geekworm HATs, no SD cards
• 27 W (5 V / 5 A) supply on every Pi, because a 3 A supply caps USB at 600 mA
• A TP-Link TL-SG105 gigabit switch in the base, one port per Pi
• A custom 3D-printed rack in Proto-pasta HTPLA: Amie’s “Blood of My Enemies” red for the frames, and carbon fiber black for the rest

Who plays where

Each Pi is named after the home ground of one of my teams.

• cityground (Nottingham Forest): Home Assistant OS. The oldest ground runs the house.
• mercedesbenz (Atlanta United): the data server. It runs a local database, Grafana, a second Pi-hole, Tailscale, and a nightly digest job. All of that fits in about 1 to 1.5 GB of RAM, thanks to a lightweight database.
• heinzfield (Steelers): Uptime Kuma, plus a Samba share for Home Assistant’s daily backups. Yes, it’s Acrisure Stadium now. I don’t care.
• theforum (Grizzlies): the primary Pi-hole. The arena where ads come to lose.

Things I’d tell anyone building something similar

• Put every job on a different Pi from the thing it protects. If primary DNS dies, devices fall back to the second Pi-hole. If Home Assistant dies, I restore the newest backup from heinzfield. If Kuma dies, it can’t tell me, which is the one flaw I’ve made peace with.
• Set up two Pi-holes and keep them in sync. I use nebula-sync to copy settings from one to the other, so a reboot doesn’t take DNS down for the whole house.
• Give every Pi a DHCP reservation. Do it on day one, before anything depends on an address.
• Use Raspberry Pi Connect for shell access. I can get a terminal on any Pi from a browser without opening ports. Tailscale covers the web dashboards.
• Spring for the 27 W supply. It’s worth it once NVMe and USB devices are drawing power.

The fun part

Home Assistant sends sensor events to Google Analytics, which exports them to BigQuery. The data server pulls the history down nightly, and there are over 5.4 million events so far. The Pi computes trends and anomalies itself, and Claude gets only those summaries to write up as a nightly email. The raw readings never leave the house.

The full write-up, with the data path diagram, is at wesleyhalldigital.com/home-automation.

I built a NAS using a Raspberry Pi with 2GB RAM and a Radxa Penta SATA HAT and all the leftover drives I had laying around.

One thing that bothered me about other builds was that the 5th SATA port often went unused. If I'm buying a 5-port HAT, I want to use all 5 ports.

So I came up with my own design.

Features:

• 5 drives, with 4 hot-swappable and the 5th semi-hot-swappable (something I might improve in a future version)
• EMC2101 controller for fan control
• 2 slim Arctic fans for cooling
• A button to cut power to the drives
• Full access to the Raspberry Pi's USB and Ethernet ports

With the pictures you can get a pretty good idea how the internal looks.

I am at a loss at what to do with the installation of Raspberry Pi OS on my microSD card with the official Windows imager. This is for a Raspberry Pi 4B, with the 64-bit version of the OS.

Every time I try to write the OS, the Imager flashes up an error telling me that it couldn't complete the process, and I have to reformat my card for any machine to actually recognise it. The failed attempt just locks up the card otherwise.

I have looked around for tips and advice and none of them seem to have worked. So far I have:

• Used two separate microSD cards - A Sandisk Ultra and a spare I got with a Rove dash cam, both 128GB
• Used four different microSD card readers (one USB 2.0, three USB 3.0+ Type C)
• Tried it on two separate machines (Windows 11 and Windows 10)
• Reformatted both cards with SD Association's SD Card formatter (Quick and Overwrite)

I keep getting the same error message telling me that it can't be completed, and that the card either disconnected (it hasn't) or has been switched to read only mode (it wasn't when I started the process)

Any help or advice would be appreciated.

Still working on it. Software side with vibe coding, but 3d print designs and concept mine.
Blog entries that explain my process here:

alpha version
beta version

EDIT: fixed the alpha version link that was linking to another post

I recently set up AirTime on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, turning it into a local time-signal transmitter for radio-controlled watches. It supports DCF77, WWVB, MSF, and JJY, and I've successfully tested it with both my Casio G-Shock and Citizen Attesa.

It's a neat little open-source project developed by Alessandro Montalto, and I thought I'd share my experience.

My build and write-up: https://packetwanderer.com/posts/airtime/

AirTime official website: https://airtime.diy/

My friend gave me a Raspberry Pi 4 that he has no use for. I load up the lastest Raspberry Pi OS onto a micro SD card it boots up. Everything seems to work except the blinking green activity LED. I can't seem to find any setting to turn it off or on. I tried some argument in the config file but even that won't work.

Are the LEDs on these Pis known to burn out?

Disclaimer:This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Valve Corporation. Steam,
Proton, Steam Deck and Steam Frame are trademarks of Valve Corporation.

I'm not the developer, but I have helped with testing. This works on Debian based distros, including RPi OS and Ubuntu.

https://github.com/Scrumpper/Steam-ARM/releases

Get the zip file, extract and execute the script:

sudo bash steam-arm-install.sh --defaults

Accepting the default options should be fine. If you are running with the default kernel of RPi OS on a Pi 5, the installer will notify you that a backup of config.txt will be made, and config.txt will be changed to boot with a 4k page size kernel, instead of the default 16k page size. If you accept, finish the installer and reboot. Now you need to start the installer again.

The script will download Steam from the Steam server. You can check the script to verify this.

I tested with Half-Life and Steamworld Dig. I didn't have much success with games that need Vulkan.

With Half-Life I needed to advertise OpenGL 3.2 support. You can start Steam like this: MESA_VERSION_OVERRIDE=3.2 steam-arm

If you run this on a Raspberry Pi 4, the x86 client of Steam will be installed (with Fex), not the ARM client (similar to the installation with Pi-Apps). The Raspberry Pi 4 has A72 cores, and the Steam ARM Linux client needs at least A74 cores.

What it is: PSPExp turns a PSP-1000 into the screen, sound and controller of a Raspberry Pi over a single USB cable. The Pi runs the games; the PSP draws them, plays their sound and sends back its buttons. The Pi needs no monitor, keyboard or setup: Wi-Fi, the time zone, SSH and installing games are all done from a launcher on the PSP.

https://reddit.com/link/1x48dlf/video/3s41m8sfo2vh1/player

How it works:

• Games run unmodified on the Pi through SDL2 or OpenGL. A replacement SDL2 layer and an OpenGL layer catch the drawing calls and send the PSP what to draw: textures once, then compact lists of sprites and triangles per frame over USB (libusb on the Pi, a small USB driver on the PSP). The PSP's own graphics chip renders them at 480x272.
• Games too heavy for the PSP's chip (Celeste 64, SuperTuxKart, Unreal Tournament, the N64 emulator) are rendered by the Pi's GPU offscreen (EGL/GLES) and each frame is sent as a picture.
• Audio streams to the PSP's sound chip; the buttons and analog nub come back as an SDL game controller.
• Games are Debian packages from a signed apt repository (https://pkg.pspexp.dev); the PSP's Packages app is a front end to it. Games whose authors publish them are downloaded from their own pages at install time, so nothing copyrighted is hosted.

Numbers on a Pi 400 + PSP-1000: Diablo and Sonic Robo Blast 2 at 60 fps, Celeste 64 at 54–60, Quake at 45–60, Unreal Tournament at 30–40 in a deathmatch, the 2D emulators at 60.

Get it: a ready card image for the Pi 3/4/400/5 (64-bit Raspberry Pi OS Lite underneath, write it with Raspberry Pi Imager → Use custom). The PSP needs custom firmware and a mini-USB data cable.

• Site and manual: https://pspexp.dev
• v1.0.0 release (card images, PSP zip): https://github.com/pleft/PSPExp/releases/latest
• Source (MIT): https://github.com/pleft/PSPExp

58 packages on the Pi so far (Quake, Celeste 64, Cave Story, OpenTTD, Command & Conquer, SuperTux…). Not affiliated with Sony.

I use a Pi as a TV and wanted to control it from my phone. Every app I tried was full of ads, had to be installed on each phone (and some weren't even on the App Store for Iphones).

So I made a small server for the Pi. Open remote.local on any phone and you get a touchpad and keyboard, no app needed. Install is one command.

https://github.com/maros-o/opencouchpad

Give it a try and let me know what you think. If you find it useful, a star on GitHub would mean a lot. Thanks!

Spent the weekend giving an old Bose iPod dock a second life as a desk radio for Sri Lankan stations.

The problem

The dock still sounds great, but I didn't want Bluetooth pairing, my phone streaming all day, or a subscription just to hear Sri Lankan radio while I work.

The setup

- Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ (512 MB) with the 3.5 mm jack into the dock's AUX input.

- Audio: MPD outputting straight to ALSA. Starts silent on boot (restore_paused yes) until a station is picked.

- Control: a small stateless Go backend with an embedded Svelte web app. 10 presets, all checked by ear on the Pi (Hiru FM, Shaa FM, Gold FM, Sun FM, Sirasa FM, Y FM, Yes FM, Lite 87, Siyatha FM, NETH FM), plus play, stop and volume.

- Access: Caddy on the Pi with Tailscale TLS. Private to my tailnet, no open ports. On the phone it's added to the Home Screen and runs full screen like a native app.

- Footprint: Tuner ~8 MB RSS, MPD ~56 MB RSS while playing. Plenty left over on the A+.

How it was built

I used an agentic workflow end to end. An AI agent helped write the spec, scaffold the Go/Svelte app, configure Caddy and test each stream URL on the Pi itself (a couple of well-known stream URLs turned out to be dead). Idea to music through the dock took one weekend.

The video shows switching stations from the browser and the sound coming out of the dock. The code isn't open source right now. If there's interest I'll tidy it up and publish it. Happy to share stream URLs or the MPD config in the meantime.

An air monitoring system that makes use of temperature, humidity, TVOC, CO2 and air pressure. Im just happy that I no longer have a bunch of loose jumper cables laying around.

I wonder if I could solve the issue of the heat of the chip inflating the readings of my temperature sensors though. Maybe if I just put some more distance between it and the pi HAT 🤔 ….

I've been spending a few weeks building Encore which is a headless Spotify Connect player using Spotify's new Soloist app.

They released Soloist a couple of months ago as their official headless client, which is great, but it was awkward to use due to needing Pipewire and having limits like needing to download a new binary every 3 months. It also (importantly for me) has a websocket where it can emit all the Spotify playback events (which I needed for a collaborative music jukebox at LAN parties - I'd been using various different workarounds for years including librespot, reverse engineering Spotify's own client websocket and just giving up and using the browser player).

Soloist was good, but I decided to create a docker container for it and add some extra functionality too:

• Supports audio devices passed through to Docker without messing around in Pipewire
• Runs on any Pi that supports Docker
• Can be configured to send to a snapcast server; or have a snapcast server connect to it; or even run its own snapcast server
• Lyrics support with HTML transparent overlay for use in something like OBS
• Webhooks for when events happen
• Inbound websocket with authentication for streaming events and control
• Outbound websocket connection for streaming events and controls to an external server

I was just going to keep it quiet/not do much with it other than what I needed, but I thought others might find it useful and I'd love to get people's feedback and suggestions.

There's setup details on the website, and the GitHub Project is open-source under MIT license.

Darwin on Pi3 is ready for people to play around with. I have made the repos public. Its important to understand with this is and what it isnt. This isnt macOS. This is something very very similar and shares a lot of the components. Everything here is open source. It is a Darwin with a pure Cocoa UI on X11. I have optimized everything for arm64/ 1GB RAM and totally disregarded other architectures. I have modified anything and everything to make the UI for this hardware. You will need Xcode 12 to build this. This is the version of Xcode closest to the version of the kernel we use. All the pi3B hardware works. This may boot on on other pi3s but there arent kexts for other hardware so everything may not work. I will add support for the other pi3 boards in the future. I do not own one so will need community testing to verify it works.

If you want to try to build it, start with this repo:

https://github.com/anurodhp/xnu-iokit-pi3/

setup third party should clone all of the many other repos. Build everything should build everything. tools/build real hw image will make 3GB image you can flash on to an SD card. The full build is huge and will take several hours.

SSH is on. Serial out works. HDMI out works. The root password is darwin. Since this is a bsd system you use pw to add/remove users and set passwords. When you boot it boots directly to X and the GSDM login screen. Logging in will take you to the new desktop with a dock. Sound works with a core audio daemon but there is nothing that uses it yet

If you use this image if you just want to flash to SD and try it out. File bugs in the iokit repo. if they are related to one of the apps Rome, Milan, Naples for Florence file them in their repo.

The ghostty terminal and the Webkit based browser are the most useful things right now. I will be publishing more user land apps and utilities to add more functionality. Things like wifi tools, setting screen, activity monitor, console viewer etc.

https://github.com/anurodhp/xnu-iokit-pi3/releases/tag/10_11_26

On and off I've been trying to build a Spotify Connect display on a RPI - for years. The screen was too small, the case didn't fit, the driver problematic, the program was never satisfying.

Enter 2026, saw the Spotify Car Thing craze and my interest returned. This time I went for a MPI5001 5" Display that I could buy at a nice price, and particularly the vendor also sold a fitting case. With RPI mounting holes! Almost by chance I took a RPI3B (the 4 was in use) that had a HiFiBerry DAC+ on it. Bought me a nice 2.5a power supply and nylon standoffs for the mounting.

I stopped fighting with Python and vibed it using the Car Thing as base. Having such nice DAC in there I got carried away and I revived my LMS server for digital files and I added an option for that too. And built some options for random music etc.

I'm quite satisifed now! I'd eventually try to improve the cabling, angle connectors and such.

A conversational AI plush toy where the Pi is just the body. Everything runs on my LAN:

Inside the plush: Pi Zero WH, USB mic, OV5647 camera, USB speaker, SG90 head servo on hardware PWM, and a cheap USB hub for mic and speaker.

The Pi runs zero ML. 512MB of RAM doesn't fit Whisper, so it just streams mic + camera over WebSocket, plays audio and moves the head. Boots straight into the app as a systemd service.

The brain is a laptop: Whisper (STT), face identity (dlib), emotion recognition (FER+), Kokoro (TTS), per-person memory (LangGraph).

LLM: any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. I run Hermes 3 Llama 3.1 8B locally, so nothing leaves the network.

The full bring-up (camera config, servo PWM, power setup) is in the hardware runbook in the repo.

Repo (MIT): github.com/msalsas/philosopher

Full write-up: https://www.hackster.io/msalsas/the-philosopher-plush-a-diy-ai-toy-that-runs-100-local-d0d268

https://github.com/jiu-0317/e_ink_display

I am working out a way to re-use the hardware for my Pwnagotchi for a similar virtual pet concept that "eats" Bluetooth devices and wireless AP (supports wardriving) and who lives on a separate microSD card from my Pwnagotchi image.

This is my buddy Harald (named for Harald Bluetooth, the Viking whose surname became the name of the Bluetooth technology), a Viking dragon who eats Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals (FOOD) and who enjoys novel discoveries and going out on adventures (JOY). He's also a protective sort and keeps an eye out for anything stalking me.

Privacy fences: Phones and watches that change their address are counted by kind, never listed or followed. The signal meter only works on devices I've marked as mine. The unknown-tracker warning only fires for a tracker that's away from its owner and has stayed with me for 30 minutes (and, when GPS is on, has moved more than 250m with me). Wi-Fi is passive scanning only - no deauthing or handshake collecting (staying out of Pwnagotchi's lane).

Extremely early days on this guy and surely a lot to tweak, but I'm pretty chuffed so far. He can certainly function without being connected to my Android phone (just feeding on BT and Wi-Fi signals, with extra happiness for novelty), but he does depend on an external GPS (in this case, the SensorServer phone app) for Wigle uploads and "walks". Harald's "Den" is a browser page that can be accessed when Harald is connected to my phone's hotspot (or whatever I have set as his home network), and shows his current e-ink screen along with extra information and certain controls (like shutting him down so he can be safely unplugged from his power supply). He can still appreciate my physical activity even if he doesn't come with me, because connecting him to my phone shares whatever distance I've covered that day and he interprets distance covered without him along for the ride as an "adventure" I have "told him about", which gives him some happiness.

There's a lot of other minutiae, but I'm just excited to share the images of the working prototype. I also verified the WIGLE uploads online and they are appearing on my account! :-D

Edit: Forgot to mention that the "unknown tracker warning" screenshot is from an earlier build where I was still adding things, so the e-ink display has an older layout on it.

Edit2: The hardware is Raspberry Pi Zero W 2 with Waveshare V4 e-ink hat, plus an external battery.

I bought this Fisher Price toy for my niece because of viral videos, but it turns out it was no where close to as annoying as they made it seem. Just a general kids toy with the usual cutesy ABC songs.

So I used a raspberry pi w2 for the brains, MAX98357A for the speaker, AS5600 for the spinning platter (it was just a platter that spun to push a button before), and a INMP441 for a microphone. Then printed a PCB board the same size as the original to mount it all inside. You can now upload your own song clips via a webpage, create a layered music track or use it as a bluetooth speaker.
There are a few 3D printed parts to help mount the platter and upgrade the speaker. All of the code, STL files, non-copyright music and tones (I'm sure you can find better real ones) are on the github here:
https://github.com/LifeOnAFarm/RaveRepeatDJTable

Also a guide of sorts with better photos here: https://nastypieceof.work/raveandrepeat

Anyway, I'm sure my sister will be extremely to have this in her house

Hello,

New to this community.
I have flashed an Ubuntu Server 24.04 image directly from Raspberry Pi Imager (did not download the image separately).

Once flashing was done, I boot the machine up and immediately run sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade.

Everything fine up until now.
Then I did sudo do-release-upgrade to go to 26.04 LTS and I got a message saying that there are packages of unknown origin and in the list it referred to snapd.

I’ve been trying to figure out for the past 10 hours why and to see if this is a warning to be worried about or something to take note of and allow the upgrade to proceed.

At this moment I am in the process of finding the correct deb package, unpacking it and comparing the hashes of the snap files on my device against the legitimate ones downloaded from launchpad.

Any help or explanation of why this is happening is much appreciated as I want to understand if this is ok or something potentially malicious.

Thanks!

I’ve seen some warnings online that the Ethernet port on a raspberry Pi cannot be easily bypassed but I can’t find a straight answer from the docs or data sheet as to what is lost if the RJ45 jack is removed. Is it just shielding or is there other functionality that would be lost/need to be replaced? Or even better is there no issue with removing the port on a 4b specifically?

The specific reason I’m wanting a smaller connector is so the cable can be unplugged and removed easily, however the hole in the housing I’m using is just a bit too small for to fit an RJ45 through

I'm using it to watch YouTube (FreeTube) and other internet media on my dumb TV, and VLC for DVD movies. Surprisingly it performs way better than Raspberry Pi OS and the UI feels much more natural than the clunky RPi desktop. It also has better support for hardware, such as external DVD player, which I couldn't get to work on Raspberry Pi OS.

Hello guys, i am working on a nvg project with the pi 5 and i ran into a problem. I don't know how to properly set the current of the module, if i try it with li-ion batteries the bms kicks in and it hickups and if i try it with the pc power supply the current jumps to over 5 amps and I don't know how much voltage to set it. The pi is powered by usb c cable and setted to 5.1V

Thanks in advance for help