IR Point And Shoot Has A Raspberry Heart In A 35mm Body

July 7, 2025 by 24 Comments

Photography is great, but sometimes it can get boring just reusing the same wavelengths over and over again. There are other options, though and when [Malcolm Wilson] decided he wanted to explore them, he decided to build a (near) IR camera. 

The IR images are almost ethereal.
Image : Malcom Wilson.

The housing is an old Yashica Electro 35 — apparently this model was prone to electrical issues, and there are a lot of broken camera bodies floating around– which hides a Pi NoIR Camera v3. That camera module, paired with an IR pass filter, makes for infrared photography like the old Yashica used to do with special film. The camera module is plugged into a Pi Zero 2 W, and it’s powered by a PiSugar battery. There’s a tiny (0.91″) OLED display, but it’s only for status messages. The viewfinder is 100% optical, as the designers of this camera intended. Point, shoot, shoot again.

There’s something pure in that experience; we sometimes find stopping to look at previews pulls one out of the creative zone of actually taking pictures. This camera won’t let you do that, though of course you do get to skip on developing photos. [Malcom] has the Pi set up to connect to his Wifi when he gets home, and he grabs the RAW (he is a photographer, after all) image files via SSH.  Follow the link above to [Malcom]’s substack, and you’ll get some design details and his python code.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s NoIR camera shows up on these pages from time to time, though rarely so artistically. We’re more likely to see it spying on reptiles, or make magic wands work.  So we are quite grateful to [Malcom] for the tip, via Petapixel. Yes, photographers and artists of all stripes are welcome to use the tips line to tell us about their work.

Follow the links in this article for more images like this.
Image: Malcom Wilson

Chasing A Raspberry Pi Bottleneck

June 30, 2025 by 9 Comments

The Raspberry Pi has been used for many things over its lifetime, and we’re guessing that many of you will have one in perhaps its most common configuration, as a small server. [Thibault] has a Pi 4 in this role, and it’s used to back up the data from his VPS in a data centre. The Pi 4 may be small and relatively affordable, but it’s no slouch in computing terms, so he was extremely surprised to see it showing a transfer speed in bytes per second rather than kilobytes or megabytes. What was up? He set out to find the bottleneck.

We’re treated to a methodical step-through of all the constituent parts of the infrastructure between the data centre and the disk, and all of them show the speeds expected. Eventually, the focus shifts to the encryption he’s using, both on the USB disk connected to the Pi and within the backup program he’s using. As it turns out, while the Pi is good at many things, encryption is not its strong point. Some work with htop shows the cores maxed out as it tries to work with encrypted data, and he’s found the bottleneck.

To show just how useful a Pi server can be without the encryption, we’re using an early model to crunch a massive language corpus.

Header image: macrophile, CC BY 2.0.

Dummy Plug Gets Smarter With Raspberry Pi

June 16, 2025 by 21 Comments

[Doug Brown] had a problem. He uses a dummy HDMI plug to fool a computer into thinking it has a monitor for when you want to run the computer headless. The dummy plug is a cheap device that fools the computer into thinking it has a monitor and, as such, has to send the Extended Display ID (EDID) to the computer. However, that means the plug pretends to be some kind of monitor. But what if you want it to pretend to be a different monitor?

The EDID is sent via I2C and, as you might expect, you can use the bus to reprogram the EEPROM on the dummy plug. [Doug] points out that you can easily get into trouble if you do this with, for example, a real monitor or if you pick the wrong I2C bus. So be careful.

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What Use Is An Original Raspberry Pi?

June 2, 2025 by 53 Comments

Almost uniquely among consumer grade computer manufacturers, the Raspberry Pi folks still support their earliest boards. We’re guessing that’s in part due to the much more recent Pi Zero using the same 32-bit system-on-chip, but it’s still impressive that a 13-year-old single board computer still has manufacturer OS support. With so many of these early boards out there, is there much you can do with them in 2025? [Jeff Geerling] gives it a try.

His test Pi is unusual in itself, the 2013 blue special edition that RS gave away in a social media promotion. Sadly we didn’t win one back in the day and neither did he, so he picked it up in an online auction. We’re treated to some very slow desktop exploration, but it’s clear that this is not where the strengths of a Pi 1 lie. It was reckoned at the time to be roughly equivalent to a Pentium II or Pentium III in PC terms, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. Instead he concludes that it’s better as a headless machine, though he notes how projects are starting to abandon 32 bit builds. The full video is below the break.

We asked the same question not so long ago, and the Hackaday Pi 1 now quietly analyses news content on its two-watt power budget. It’s still a useful little Linux box for your script-based projects even if it will never win any speed prizes.

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An LLM For The Raspberry Pi

May 10, 2025 by 32 Comments

Microsoft’s latest Phi4 LLM has 14 billion parameters that require about 11 GB of storage. Can you run it on a Raspberry Pi? Get serious. However, the Phi4-mini-reasoning model is a cut-down version with “only” 3.8 billion parameters that requires 3.2 GB. That’s more realistic and, in a recent video, [Gary Explains] tells you how to add this LLM to your Raspberry Pi arsenal.

The version [Gary] uses has four-bit quantization and, as you might expect, the performance isn’t going to be stellar. If you are versed in all the LLM lingo, the quantization is the way weights are stored, and, in general, the more parameters a model uses, the more things it can figure out.

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Jenny’s (Not Quite) Daily Drivers: Raspberry Pi 1

April 14, 2025 by 47 Comments

An occasional series of mine on these pages has been Daily Drivers, in which I try out operating systems from the point of view of using them for my everyday Hackaday work. It has mostly featured esoteric or lesser-used systems, some of which have been unexpected gems and others have been not quite ready for the big time.

Today I’m testing another system, but it’s not quite the same as the previous ones. Instead I’m looking at a piece of hardware, and I’m looking at it for use in my computing projects rather than as my desktop OS. You’ll all be familiar with it: the original Raspberry Pi appeared at the end of February 2012, though it would be May of that year before all but a lucky few received one. Since then it has become a global phenomenon and spawned a host of ever-faster successors, but what of that original board from 2012 here in 2025? If you have a working piece of hardware it makes sense to use it, so how does the original stack up? I have a project that needs a Linux machine, so I’m dusting off a Model B and going down memory lane.

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Going To The Top With A Raspberry Pi Elevator

April 9, 2025 by 17 Comments

[BorisDigital] was mesmerised by a modern elevator. He decided to see how hard it would be to design his own elevator based on Raspberry Pis. He started out with a panel for the elevator and a call panel for the elevator lobby. Of course, he would really need three call panels since he is pretending to have a three-floor building.

It all looks very professional, and he has lots of bells and whistles, including an actual alarm. With the control system perfected, it was time to think about the hydraulics and mechanical parts to make a door and an actual lift.

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