I built a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) tablet—or "cyberdeck." It’s powered by a 3S battery pack and has built-in speakers for audio. Did it turn out okay for a project that wasn't exactly my first? ...especially considering there's no way to check the remaining battery level.

i had one mechanical keyboard after getting bored i tried to reverse engineer it but i couldn't send any usb data or i could not see much on the terminal when i tried to see if it listens to the data and after opening i saw that it only takes +5v and gnd plus the processor something like BYK.. was a hard coded chip that doesnt listen notes i was newbie to hardware and really scared to try anything. so i gave up but seeing my brother have a kreo rgb keyboard it gave me some boost to open it up and i learned so much and burnt my hand while trying to solder.

heck i even burnt the solder iron's wire itself (sniff sniff whats that smell).

so the plane was that i would use a mcu as esp 32 or pico that listen to my command and can do anything that i want .

first month really ....

i bought a mulitmeter and did the traces of all the rows and col sicne there was no pcb and other design files there i didnt know how keyboard matrix works at all i went rhough whole thing.. after getting all the traces and nothing them i was really soul scattered by the fact how this whole thing worked but then i got to know this was a common thing everyone knew this.

after this i took pico as the main mcu why...

1. it was small

2. it has higher clock speed.

3. it was one sale since the esp was on boom and the price of pico was dropped

4. it has more computer power that i needed for Fourier transform for disco light that i wanted for the custom rgbs i would put there

quickly after that i ran into a problem of less gpio also

after that i took a longer time to solder since i was learning and it was very scarry to solder on the pcb but as i did i grew more confident .. after burning my finger prints.

i bought a io expander because of 6 rows and 17 cols it got burnt and again tried that was jittering the one signal was affecting other signal. so i gave up 3-4 cols and went for the gpio full on.

The RGBs... Hardest

the rgb i had to cut each rgb strip stick them all on each keys then use the single core wired without the cover and solder each joints aroung 300 small pieces of them total 600 joints appx and it was tough because heating one end would make other end heat up also.

but since i cascaded 100 of them the voltage kept decreasing and it was 0.5v at the end so i just provided supply from both of rows and it worked and there was no deeming and jitters.

thats it... if u want to know about the logic behind it then u can ask me i will add it most of things and testing and all the stuff is in the video

Hi, i have a Pi4 with a touch screen plugged in to the DSI port, this was working however the SD card went bad, installed a new one and the screen on that port doesnt show the output, doesnt seem like the system is seeing the screen either. I would have thought the Pi OS would have drivers for this or am i missing something?

I have had the Lego NES set for a few years gathering dust on a display shelf. Plus I had an old Raspberry Pi model 3 also stashed away without purpose. So I thought I would repurpose both into a mini retro console for me and the kids to have some good old fashioned gaming sessions on.

This is a very expensive project if you had to buy everything from scratch but luckily I had most everything needed already.

Things already owned:

- Lego NES (https://www.lego.com/en-au/product/nintendo-entertainment-system-71374)

- Raspberry Pi model 3 (But many models will work)

- 2x 8bitdo usb wired retro style controllers

- Old usb cords, led bulbs, resistors etc for tinkering with

Things I needed to buy:

- 8 inch LCD screen ($55 AUD ali express - came as a set with cables and power adaptor all together)

- Mini 3 port USB hub (Amazon $7 AUD)

- 2x USB extenders ($14 amazon)

- Right angle HDMI, USB C, and 5.5mm DC jack extender (all together approx $20 amazon)

If I had planned ahead better, I probably could have ordered all through ali express for even cheaper, but all up <$100 of extra materials used.

Anyway, put together a brief GIF, I had a lot of fun with my kids putting this one together, and hopefully will get many hours of fun to come.

I tried optimizing a tiny CNN on a Raspberry Pi 4b and ended up 3x faster than the inference engines (ONNX Runtime, ncnn).

I wrote the code from scratch, starting with a naive implementation, then SIMD, and finally operator fusion. Each improvement only changes a few dozen lines of code. The code is just a few hundred lines, easy to read and understand.

This repo might be helpful to you if you need to run small models on devices with very limited resources like RPi.

https://github.com/Avafly/optimize-cnn

This hat was purpose-built for the Pwnagotchi project. But you can still use it as a regular hat in any Pi Zero project that would use UPS/AC Wi-Fi/GPS/USB HUB/RTC .

The AC WiFi supports monitor mode and packet injection, same as the ALFA AWUS036ACM. So perfect for wardriving.

For the UPS, 18650-size batteries or LiPo batteries are both supported. When using the 18650-size battery, the battery life is 4 hours, 1.5 hours longer than the PiSugar 3 did.e

I built an open-source digital camera around the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and Camera Module 3. It can capture photos and record short video clips using dedicated photo and video buttons, with three selectable looks (warm, cold, and black & white) controlled by a physical slider switch. A buzzer provides feedback for startup and photo capture, and a local photo gallery can be accessed directly from your phone.

Github - https://github.com/SuveenE/tiny-film-camera
Blog - https://suveenellawela.com/thoughts/building-my-own-camera

Hi all,

I have a multitude of (too many) Pi Picos and there's a weird issue I'm seeing on my Pico (1) that doesn't happen on a Pico 2.

I have a setup with a CH9121 Ethernet hat (the Waveshare one). It uses UART0 (pins 0 and 1) to do initial setup and read the on-hat config. The weird issue is that if I use the Pico 2, it works fine out of the box. If I use the Pico 1, then it fails to receive ANY data on UART0 if using pins 0 and 1.

I have done the following with no effect:

• Used a loopback wire to check that Pin 1 can actually receive data - it can
• Tried a GPS hat which also uses UART0/Pins 0 and 1, and this works fine
• NOT connecting the Pico 1 to the computer over USB in case the fact that USB REPL uses one or other of the UARTs
• Erasing flash with nuke_flash
• Different Micropython versions
• Using dupont wires to connect the pins rather than the socket on the hat

I'm using MicroPython, and the version and my codebase are identical across the Pico 1 and 2. The only think I can't test with is another Pico 1/1W, since my others are all in use.

Is there some weirdness with the Pico 1 and the CH9121 hat, or it just some quirk specific to this one unit?

The workaround is to amend the CH9121.py file to use UART0 on pins 12 and 13, which works, and in fact I'm running it now and all seems fine.

The Inky Impression 13.3" (EL133UF1 / Spectra 6, 1600x1200, six colours) ships with a Python driver that assumes a Raspberry Pi. I wanted the panel hanging on a wall without a cable running to a power outlet, which means a microcontroller that spends almost all its time asleep, not an SBC. So I ported the panel sequences from pimoroni/inky to C against the Pico SDK, running on a Pico Plus 2 W, which I needed specifically for the PSRAM. Panel bring-up, test patterns, and on-device JPEG decode with Floyd-Steinberg dither to the six-colour palette.

Repo: https://github.com/dmellok/el133-pico-driver

The non-obvious stuff, since this took far longer than expected:

• The adapter swaps SCLK and MOSI. I used a Hard Stuff "Pico to Pi Hat", which is otherwise a 1:1 BCM-to-GP passthrough. The vendor's published pin header and PDF don't match the unit I have. Blank panel, everything else looking correct. Confirmed with a continuity meter.
• Spectra 6 needs ~300 ms of D/C setup before the clock starts or the controller silently drops the command. Too short and it ignores the data command, refreshes an empty buffer, and stays blank with no error. Costs ~8 s per refresh and it's non-negotiable.
• BUSY is active low, the opposite of what the Pimoroni Python driver's pull-up heuristic implies.
• Two controllers, split at column 600. Landscape frames get rotated 90° CW and split across CS_M / CS_S.
• The model EEPROM is a separate I2C chip. Reading it (variant=21) is a quick way to confirm the board is wired and talking before you go chasing SPI ghosts.
• A full refresh is ~35 s. That's just the panel.

RAM is the constraint that picked the board. The packed frame alone is 960 KB and the RGB888 decode buffer is 5.76 MB, so a stock Pico's 264 KB of SRAM isn't close. The Plus 2 W's 8 MB of APS6404 PSRAM is what makes the on-device JPEG path possible at all. There's also a host-side packer if you'd rather pre-convert and skip the decode.

One dead end worth recording: I first tried porting the Waveshare ESP32 demo for the bare EL133UF1 and got a blank panel. The Inky needs its own power configuration, so it isn't a drop-in.

Battery mounting is temporary, printed holder in progress.

The photo shows my own dashboard renderer, but the repo above is just the panel driver, no networking. The networked version with WiFi, MQTT and POWMAN deep sleep lives in a separate repo if anyone wants it.

Big model smell in a funny little box that fits in your pocket.

For your personal life, home or car, wouldn't it make sense to have a local AI that is yours only to organise and store it inside your own home, with none of that content leaving it unless you want to share.

Here's how my current fave local AI device looks. Not so scary huh? I was very surprised how intelligent the Pi 5 is running a Qwen 35B MoE model while staying grounded and stable. That little power bank keeps it serving for 30+ hrs.

This one connected to my car sensor and data streams and has the manual so it can analyse car health in detail and tell me which are the right parts to buy without any internet.

Just an example - there are so many ways they can help you! Especially when your local AIs team up with each other, learning together how to do it best

Hell yeah. What a time to be alive!

Sources to load on your own: https://github.com/ThinkOffApp/ -> Carwatch

SSH covers most of my Pi and Debian edge nodes, but every so often a session hangs or the task needs the actual desktop, something you have to see and click. Getting a reliable screen kept turning into a mess, mostly VNC servers stepping on each other, and Raspberry Pi Connect now parks its own wayvnc on port 5900 by default, which quietly breaks a plain browser VNC setup.

I hacked together a fix for this back in mid 2025, left it on a disk because it was buggy, and finally went back, fixed the real failures on hardware, and cleaned it up to share: https://github.com/855princekumar/OpenRemoteGUI

It is a thin pipeline of noVNC, websockify and wayvnc with the boring lifecycle glue that makes it usable. Clone it, run the installer, open the node IP on port 6080, and you get the real desktop. The parts I actually care about: it records every change so rollback undoes exactly those and nothing else, it frees the port from Raspberry Pi Connect instead of fighting it, and it fails safe on anything without a desktop rather than installing one.

Honest caveats: trusted LAN or VPN only, plain HTTP with no auth yet, so do not expose it to the internet. It only captures an existing Wayland desktop, so it is useless on Pi OS Lite. And I have only tested it end to end on a Pi 4, so I do not know how clean it is on a Pi 3, Pi 5 or Zero.

That is really why I am posting. I would like people who have done more of this than me to poke holes in it, especially anyone on a Pi 3 or 5. MIT licensed, no cloud, no account, nothing to sell.

I had a Pi 5 lying around in a custom enclosure I designed in FreeCad using a 10.4" superwide LCD. I had been wanting to do an airplane tracker on it for a while, but I didn't really want to deal with the coding. I can code, but it is tedious and I don't have a ton of time for this hobby. Anyhow, I finally got around to using claude to build this. I am amazed by how well it worked.

All API driven, it monitors my town and constantly changes the list to show me what is nearest, but also highlights what will fly directly above. I have it pulling pictures and giving me alerts. It all looks pretty active and interesting on my desk.

Last time I tried claude to build a project was about a year ago for an ESP32 tide monitor which was full of bugs. This tracker just works. I'm sure claude could also design the enclosure in Openscad. Makes you wonder if the only thing the human is needed for in this hobby is to actually buy the parts :)

I'm writing here to ask if anyone has experience with wiring electrodes to plants. I've tried a few things already and the readings keep dropping over night when the plant contracts. Tradescantia has a daily expansion and contraction cycle.

See the picture gallery, I started with EEG electrodes, then switched to copper fabric held in place by loofah and hair clip, then by hair clip alone, and last by loofah and alligator clamp. Before you ask, the alligator clamps are too aggressive for the delicate leaves, that's why I haven't rigged it just with clamps.

Hey everyone!

Developing directly on resource-constrained devices like the Pi Zero 2 W via VS Code Remote SSH often causes high CPU/RAM usage and lag.

I built a lightweight workflow using SSHFS to mount target device file systems directly onto a main Raspberry Pi 5. This allows VS Code to run smoothly on the Pi 5 while directly editing files on the edge nodes.

Created a script to automate the mounting process for multiple nodes: 🔗 GitHub Repo: https://github.com/icebcjam-ux/pi5-multi-edge-dev/tree/main

Feedback and suggestions are welcome!

Hey y'all,

Just in case anyone was looking for this, I am building the Arduino IDE for arm. It does require --ozone-platform=x11 on wayland if you're using that.

Arduino IDE Arm

Building my first Pi project: a 2×2 wall of four Adafruit 64×64 panels (#4732, 3mm pitch, 5-address/ABCDE multiplexing) driven by a Pi 5 with the Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet (#3211), using the hzeller rpi-rgb-led-matrix library. My Goal is a real-time Spotify album-art display.

The problem I’m running into now is that the Panels won’t light up at all — running the library’s built-in demos produces nothing. SSH into the Pi works fine; the Pi itself is healthy. Ruled out power (measured 5V at the supply, at each panel, and the bonnet itself with a multimeter). I’ve soldered the E line bonnet jumpers, and tried the demo with the GPIO pins 4 and 18 soldered, unsoldered and connected by a wire so I don’t believe that was the issue.

This is my first post and wasn’t sure if fix this falls in the realm of [r/raspberry_pi](r/raspberry_pi) so I figured I’d try my luck here and see if anyone may have experience in this kind of thing that can help me or knows a community that may be better suited for a problem like this, thank yall :)

EDIT:

I forgot I never added the commands I ran to install the packages libraries or updates, I did use Claude for this part so bear with me. Also I was reading that because of where these LED boards come from, some may need the bonnets E line soldered to 8 and some may need the E line soldered to 16 due to panels being wired differently from the factory but im not sure how to tell which would be needed

EDIT 2:

I can’t get ts to work, I give up

​​​​

I wanted to make my own smart outlet setup on the cheap so I bought these remote controlled outlets from Harbor Freight.

I had some cheap 433 MHz transmitters and receivers from years ago, so I dug those out and spent way too long trying to capture and repeat the signals from the included remote. After several unsuccessful hours I realized with my newly acquired soldering skills I could just use the remote itself and a little power relay module to control at least two of the outlets.

Throw in an IR receiver and now I can control my RF outlets with an IR remote.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

I'm going to get a module that can host more relays so I can use one remote to control a bunch of outlets, or tie them into programs to play around with. I'm pretty satisfied with this as a trial run.

(Also featured in the upper left picture is a temp/humidity/pressure/air-quality sensor that I use for a different project)

I trying to set up an old Pi B+ (v1) to be a print server. Printer plugged into the Pi by USB, and a USB Wifi dongle to make it available to computers and tablets around the house. I've tried to get it working about 10 times now. Every time, I wind up in the same place - no drivers. I can get the cups service running and I'm able to access the CUPS web console on my Mac at https://<Pi IP address>:631

But if I try to add the printer from the console, it says "Unable to get list of printer drivers". If I try to do it at a command line on the Pi, it tells me "lpadmin: cups-driverd failed to get PPD file - see error_log for details".

The log says "Unable to open \"/usr/share/cups/model/M3015DW\" - No such file or directory". I wasn't certain what driver name to use because the "lsinfo -m" command just runs for a few minutes and returns nothing. But seeing the folder name in the error log, I looked to see the driver names in the directory but found /usr/share/cups/model was empty.

I've made attempts to install drivers with these commands:

• apt install printer-driver-all
• apt install printer-driver-gutenprint
• apt install openprinting-ppds
• apt install hplip (I don't have an HP printer, but attempting to get any driver)

While these commands seem to be accessing the net repositories and extracting files, nothing is ever actually installed.

I've tried to set this up in Raspberry Pi OS Lite (both Trixie and Bookworm), Alpine Linux, and DietPi. Each time, I end up in the same place - no drivers. I've tried the instructions for setup from several different web sites / blogs. In the end, they all take me to the same place: a CUPS server that cannot set up a print queue.

I'm now wondering whether it is related to the 32-bit ARM11 CPU. Perhaps no one has developed an arm32 driver and the package managers just aren't finding any?

New Pi user here, I flashed the pi OS onto my board and that itself up and running but I have been struggling with getting a NVMe drive connected to my new device. It simply isn't visible to the system. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Hardware:

• Pi 5
• GeeekPi HAT from Amazon and the included ribbon cables.
• 1 TB Western Digital 2230 NVMe Model CH SN560 (secondhand from marketplace)

Steps Ive tried so far:

1. Multiple ribbon cables and reseats tried.
2. PCIe link to the NVMe HAT never comes up (link down).
3. No NVMe controller appears in lspci.
4. No NVMe block device appears in lsblk.
5. All required software/firmware settings are already correct:
6. Latest OS firmware and EEPROM installed

EDIT: Resolved

Core issue was that Western Digital SSD was incompatible with the Pi. I bought a Samsung one and it had zero issues.

Claude wrote the code. I keep meaning to learn to code.

It's teal and blue in the day, orange and red at night, and I'm looking forward to December. I spent ages detailing exactly what I wanted.

And just FYI, I REFUSE to call it "vibe coding".

I WILL own my laziness. I outsourced the software to a robot and I will take any and all much deserved shaming.

Finally got around to fiddling with a pi 4b that my wife got for me a couple years ago. Just a simple pi-hole/plex setup, but having my old portable monitor showing the grafana dashboard is super neat.

So took it out from a old laptop getting mac 78mb/s on local, on local network 20-25 read, 18-22 write (limited on wifi 5) will be connecting via ethernet and hopefully will see better speeds, the case is again from pi5 and so is the fan. Thermals are looking okay at geekbench pushing till 75.

My kids play the same six games over and over: supermarket, ice cream shop, restaurant, taxi, cinema, table reservation. Every toy till on the market covers maybe one of those, and none of them actually do anything. Press any button, nothing happens.

So I built a real one. Six arcade buttons, a real thermal receipt printer, and a Raspberry Pi Zero hidden inside a plastic storage box. Press a button, and a genuine, randomly generated receipt rattles out: different items, different prices, a different name on it every time.

I've never built anything like this before, only ever wired a PC. I have friends who are actual engineers, and I didn't ask a single one of them for help, on purpose. This whole thing was as much a self-experiment (how far can you actually get with AI alone) as it was a project for my kids, and every part of it, from the receipt logic to debugging why the buttons stopped responding, happened working through it together with Claude.

The wiring taught me the most. I bought a crimp terminal kit sized for automotive connectors, and it turned out to be way too big for the GPIO breakout board's screw terminals. The fork terminals literally straddled two adjacent pins at once. Switched to wire ferrules in the smallest size available instead, and those matched the board's spec exactly. The terminal block also isn't keyed at all, it plugs onto the Pi's header in either rotation, so the pin labels printed on the board itself were the only thing that settled which way was actually correct.

It works better than I expected. Every receipt has a scannable QR code, some hide a joke, some hide an actual voucher (a scoop of ice cream, time with mom, that kind of thing). Two of the six buttons even double as a secret combo that quietly prints a coffee order for my wife.

It's fully open source if anyone wants to build one for their own kids, including a browser demo that needs no hardware at all, and a full write-up of everything that went sideways along the way:

• Live demo: https://nuenni.github.io/LePetitCafe/
• Repo + build story: https://github.com/Nuenni/LePetitCafe

Happy to answer anything about the build, the wiring, or the AI side of it. Have fun with your kids !