Network Scanner Finds Every Raspberry Pi

April 29, 2026 by 34 Comments

DHCP is great for getting machines on the network with a minimum of fuss. However, it can also make remote administration a pain because you never know which IP you’re supposed to be SSHing into. [Philipp] ran into this problem quite often, so decided to whip up an app to make things easier. 

At it’s heart, the app is a simple network scanner—of which many already exist. However, [Philipp] had found that many options on Android were peppered with ads that made them highly undesirable to use. Thus, he whipped up his own, with a particular eye to working with the Raspberry Pi. It’s not uncommon for a hacker to have a few scattered around the home network, and it can be a real chore keeping track of where they all end up in IP land. The scanner can specifically single out the Raspberry Pi boards on the network via MAC-OUI and mDNS detection. Plus, just in case you need it, [Philipp] threw in some GPIO pinouts and electronics calculators just to make the app more useful.

If you’ve been looking for an open-source network scanner without all the ugly junk, this project might just be for you. You can also check out the source over on Github if that’s relevant to your interests. We’ve seen some interesting custom network scanners before, too. If you’re whipping up some fun packet-flinging software of your own, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Wearable MIDI Controller Built With Raspberry Pi

April 21, 2026 by 7 Comments

Most synths happily get by with keyboard or pad inputs and make lovely sounds in response. [Becky Clarke] and her fellow collaborators are building a synth that works rather differently. DigitSynth is a wearable controller that’s rather fun to interact with.

The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi 5. It’s set up to talk to a TI ADS1115 ADC chip that lets it read a bunch of analog flex sensors embedded in a right-hand glove, while the Pi can also read a bunch of tactile buttons activated by the left hand. The flex sensors are used to control synth parameters like LFO rate and filter cutoffs, while the buttons control chord changes. The Raspberry Pi runs custom code to read these devices and generate the requisite MIDI commands to send to a Roland JD-Xi synth which is responsible for actually making the sound. Both sets of fingers are also dotted with LEDs for visual feedback, controlled via a TLC59711 PWM driver.

It’s a fun build that creates some ethereal sounds in an intuitive way, thanks to the nature of the interface. We’ve featured some similar builds before, using the flexure of the hand to create musical soundscapes. Video after the break.

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Cooking A Raspberry Pi FireWire HAT With Backfeeding

April 15, 2026 by 7 Comments

Recently [Jeff Geerling] has been tinkering with FireWire in order to use some older gear, which includes the use of a Raspberry Pi HAT called the Firehat. This provides a 6-pin FireWire port courtesy of the VIA VT6315N PCIe-to-FireWire chipset. As is typical with USB gear today as well, some FireWire gear requires more power than a port can provide, requiring the use of a powered hub. Unfortunately the use of a powered FireWire hub caused a bit of a conflagration event on [Jeff]’s desk.

Part of the issue appears to be that this Firehat board was designed as a companion to the Equip-1 DV capture device, with no attention paid to the idea that someone might be backfeeding power from an attached hub. As a result the VIA chip cried uncle and let out the magic smoke.

With this Firehat board taking its name clearly a bit too literal, [Jeff] will be reporting his findings to the developers, in the hope that perhaps some diodes or another solution against backfeeding can be added to the final design. Fortunately he was sent this board for testing prior to public release, so this definitely shows a clear flaw that can now be corrected.

We hope that [Jeff] has a good HEPA air filtration setup in his office to get rid of the acrid magic smoke, as it’s not meant to be enjoyed for long periods.

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The Smallest Dialup ISP Is A Raspberry Pi And A Prison Phone

April 4, 2026 by 29 Comments

There were a plethora of tiny, local ISPs in the days of dial-up internet. Along with the big providers, many cities would have more than one. Some of those have survived broadband, but none of them were as small as [Jeff Geerling]’s Pi ISP — a tiny dialup ISP built so his Aunt’s old G3 MacBook can get online at 36kbps, as God and [Robert Kahn] intended.

Hardware-wise, the Raspberry Pi is at one end of the chain, and your retrocomputer at another. In between, you’ll have a USB modem plugged into the Pi, and a device called a “two-way line simulator” to create a dial tone for that plain-old-telephone goodness. [Jeff] notes that these were commonly used in prisons for the phones that visitors use to talk to inmates.

Of course, since these devices are designed strictly for voice transmissions, which POTS was built for, you’re not going to get over 36 kbps, and that’s even with high-quality gear. The cheaper options might drop you down to 28k… just like with an ISP back in the day. ‘You get what you pay for’ is very rarely false.

Now, you can use this technology to just connect two computers together — as we’ve featured previously — but [Jeff] has gone the extra mile to put together, via Ansible, an easy-to-install software package that will let the Raspberry Pi act just like your ISP’s servers once did, and connect you to that series of tubes once called the World Wide Web. Of course, the World Wide Web isn’t built for dial-up anymore, so you’re going to be waiting… a while. Hackaday’s front page isn’t especially heavy, weighing about 4MB at the time of this writing, but that’s 15 minutes of load time, and you still aren’t reading the articles.

You also won’t be able to access much on old machines that can’t do HTTPS, but [Jeff] thought of that and bundles [rdmark]’s MacProxyClassic to translate the modern web into HTML tags that Netscape can understand and serve them over HTTP. You’ll still be waiting for our modern bloat, but perhaps not quite so long.

If you want the “authentic” dial-up experience, you’ll need to see the lightweight webpages of Yesteryear, and MacProxyClassic contains a Wayback Machine extension for that purpose. We featured a similar project a while back that did that, but without all the joys of dial-up. Now get off the computer, we’re expecting a call!

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The Raspberry Pi 4 With 3 GB RAM Is No Joke

April 2, 2026 by 60 Comments
Raspberry Pi 5 price increases. (Credit: Jeff Geerling)
Raspberry Pi 5 price increases. (Credit: Jeff Geerling)

Although easily dismissed by some as another cruel April Fools joke, Raspberry Pi’s announcement of a new 3 GB model of the Raspberry Pi 4 along with (more) price increases for other models was no joke. Courtesy of the ongoing RAMpocalypse, supplies of LPDDR4 and LPDDR5 are massively affected, leading to this new RPi 4 model with two 1.5 GB LPDDR4 chips, as these are apparently cheaper to source.

Affected in this latest price increase across RP’s product range are RPi 4 and 5 models with 4 or more GB of RAM, with price bumps ranging from $25 on the low end to $150 for the Raspberry Pi 500+. If you wanted a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM, you’re now paying $300 for the privilege.

Obviously, this news has got people like [Jeff Geerling] rather down in the dumps, essentially stating that using SBCs like the RPi is now beyond the means of many hobbyists. While you can still use SBCs that use e.g. LPDDR2 RAM, such as the older RPi Zero, 2 and 3 models, [Jeff] himself is now moving more towards wrangling with snakes on MCUs, as these boards are so far not significantly affected in terms of price.

With current projections in the RAM market being that this year will still see more price increases, it remains hard to tell exactly how ‘temporary’ this situation will be. That said, using readily available, powerful and cheap MCUs like the ESP32 variants for projects isn’t a bad idea if you really don’t need to be running more than perhaps FreeRTOS.

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Using FireWire On A Raspberry Pi Before Linux Drops Support

March 27, 2026 by 31 Comments

Once the premium option for data transfers and remote control for high-end audiovisual and other devices, FireWire (IEEE 1394) has been dying a slow death ever since Apple and Sony switched over to USB. Recently Apple correspondingly dropped support for it in MacOS 26, and Linux will follow in 2029. The bright side of this when you’re someone like [Jeff Geerling] is that this means three more years of Linux support for one’s FireWire gear, including on the Raspberry Pi with prosumer gear from 1999.

If you’re not concerned about running the latest and greatest – and supported – software, then using an old or modern Mac or PC is of course an option, but with Linux support still available [Jeff] really wanted to get it working on Linux. Particularly on a Raspberry Pi in order to stay on brand.

Adding a FireWire port to a Raspberry Pi SBC is easy enough with an RPi 5 board as you can put a Mini PCIe HAT on it into which you slot a mini PCIe to Firewire adapter. At this point lspci shows the new device, but to use it you need to recompile the Linux kernel with Firewire support. On the Raspberry Pi you then also need to enable it in the device tree overlay, as shown in the article.

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Recording HDR Video With A Raspberry Pi

March 19, 2026 by 1 Comment

The Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers can be hooked up with a wide range of compatible cameras. There are a number of first party options, but you don’t have to stick with those—there are other sensors out there with interesting capabilities, too. [Collimated Beard] has been exploring the use of the IMX585 camera sensor, exploiting its abilities to capture HDR content on the Raspberry Pi.

The IMX585 sensor from Sony is a neat part, capable of shooting at up to 3840 x 2160 resolution (4K) in high-dynamic range if so desired. Camera boards with this sensor that suit the Raspberry Pi aren’t that easy to find, but there are designs out there that you can look up if you really want one. There are also some tricks you’ll have to do to get this part working on the platform. As [Collimated Beard] explains, in the HDR modes, a lot of the standard white balance and image control algorithms don’t work, and image preview can be unusable at times due to the vagaries of the IMX585’s data format. You’ll also need to jump some hurdles with the Video4Linux2 tools to enable the full functionality of these modes.

Do all that, recompile the kernel with some tweaks and the right drivers, though, and you’ll finally be able to capture in 16-bit HDR modes. Oh, and don’t forget—you’ll need to find a way deal with the weird RAW video files this setup generates. It’s a lot of work, but that’s the price of entry to work with this sensor right now. If it helps convince you, the sample shots shared by [Collimated Beard] are pretty good.

If you’re looking to record some really juicy, colorful imagery with the Raspberry Pi, this is a difficult but viable way to go. We’ve seen some other hardcore Raspberry Pi camera hacks of late, too.

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