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.

Yesterday I posted the first real test of my Raspberry Pi-powered scrolling ticker with one of its screensaver modes. I got the sports ticker code working tonight, and I'm really happy with the way it's coming along. The apparent flickering is a an artifact of recording the video with my phone. IRL it looks really good.

The display consists of four 128x64 pixel P2.5 LED panels in a custom printed case. It's run by a Raspberry Pi 4B with 4GB of memory and an Adafruit Triple LED Matrix Bonnet. The panels are powered by a Meanwell LRS-200-5 power supply, while the RPi is powered by a separate RS-15-5 power supply to isolate it from any potential voltage drops from the LED panels.

Still more display modes to implement, and ultimately, I plan to control it with a phone app.

Hello all, I have tried about every troubleshooting tip I can find for this issue, but I still can't add my Raspberry Pi NAS as a network drive to my Windows desktop.

I am following an article of a build in the 2026 version of the Raspberry Pi Handbook for building your own private cloud server. I am using a Raspberry Pi 5 with the lite version of Raspberry Pi OS. The build also has 2 SSDs connected to the Pi using SATA to USB adapters, and is connected to my router (Netgear RAX 40) with an ethernet cable.

I have progressed fine and gotten Open Media Vault installed, the drives mounted, and the share created by following the article, but I have to connect to the pi in Google Chrome by using the ip address. I am on the same local subnet as my PC and everything else I have, so I haven't done any fancy networking at all.

I am able to connect to the Pi using Putty and SSH to it perfectly fine using the name I set up for it when imaging the SD card the OS uses, but that is the only time the <hostname>.local works.

I have checked and made sure the mDNS daemon is active:

I have tried adding the network drive using the IP address but that doesn't work either, and returns the same 0x80070035 as using the hostname:

I am on Windows 10 on this machine. One interesting development I tried with my router was checking the device on connected devices and found the device was named without the .local.

I added the .local at the end of the name and I was able to bring up Open Media Vault's login page using the hostname in Chrome. However when I tried to log in Open Media Vault threw a software error page. That didn't change anything in mapping the network drive either, so I reverted that change.

Any and all help would be appreciated. At this point my guess is my router doesn't support mDNS, but that is just a guess, and would like to try and avoid buying a new router unless that is definitely the issue.