Raspberry Pi

1869 Articles

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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A Portable Electronics Workstation

April 4, 2025 by 26 Comments

You don’t see them as often as you used to, but it used to be common to see “electronics trainers” which were usually a collection of components and simple equipment combined with a breadboard, often in a little suitcase. We think [Pro Maker_101’s] portable electronics workstation is in the same kind of spirit, and it looks pretty nice.

The device uses a 3D printed case and a custom PC board. There are a number of components, although no breadboard. There is a breakout board for Raspberry Pi GPIO, though. So you could use the screw terminals to connect to an external breadboard. We were thinking you could almost mount one as a sort of lid so it would open up like a book with the breadboard on one side and the electronics on the other. Maybe version two?

One thing we never saw on the old units? An HDMI flat-screen display! We doubt you’d make one exactly like this, of course, but that’s part of the charm. You can mix and match exactly what you want and make the prototyping station of your dreams. Throw in a small portable soldering iron, a handheld scopemeter, and you can hack anywhere.

We’d love to see something like this that was modular. Beats what you could build in 1974.

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An Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age

April 1, 2025 by 14 Comments

One of the most exciting trends we’ve seen over the last few years is the rise of truly personal computers — that is, bespoke computing devices that are built by individuals to fit their specific needs or wants. The more outlandish of these builds, often inspired by science fiction and sporting non-traditional layouts, tend to be lumped together under the term “cyberdecks”, but there are certainly builds where that description doesn’t quite stick, including the Cyber Writer from [Darbin Orvar].

With a 10-inch screen, you might think it was intended to be a portable, but its laser-cut Baltic birch plywood construction says otherwise. Its overall design reminds us of early computer terminals, and the 60% mechanical keyboard should help reinforce that feeling that you’re working on a substantial piece of gear from yesteryear.

There’s plenty of room inside for additional hardware.

The Cyber Writer is powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero W 2, which might seem a bit underpowered, but [Darbin] has paired it with a custom minimalist word processor. There’s not a lot of detail about the software, but the page for the project says it features integrated file management and easy email export of documents.

The software isn’t yet available to the public, but it sounds like [Darbin] is at least considering it. Granted, there’s already distraction-free writing software out there, but we’re pretty firm believers that there’s no such thing as too many choices.

If you’re looking for something a bit more portable, the impressive Foliodeck might be more your speed.

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Build Customized Raspberry Pi OS Images With Rpi-image-gen

March 26, 2025 by 21 Comments

Recently Raspberry Pi publicly announced the release of their new rpi-image-gen tool, which is advertised as making custom Raspberry Pi OS (i.e. Debian for specific Broadcom SoCs) images in a much more streamlined fashion than with the existing rpi-gen tool, or with third-party solutions. The general idea seems to be that the user fetches the tool from the GitHub project page, before running the build.sh script with parameters defining the configuration file and other options.

The main advantage of this tool is said to be that it uses binary packages rather than (cross-)compiling, while providing a range of profiles and configuration layers to target specific hardware & requirements. Two examples are provided in the GitHub project, one for a ‘slim’ project, the other for a ‘webkiosk‘ configuration that runs a browser in a restricted (Cage) environment, with required packages installed in the final image.

Looking at the basic ‘slim’ example, it defines the INI-style configuration in config/pi5-slim.cfg, but even when browsing through the main README it’s still somewhat obtuse. Under device it references the mypi5 subfolder which contains its own shell script, plus a cmdline.txt and fstab file. Under image it references the compact subfolder with another bunch of files in it. Although this will no doubt make a lot more sense after taking a few days to prod & poke at this, it’s clear that this is not a tool for casual users who just want to quickly put a custom image together.

This is also reflected in the Raspberry Pi blog post, which strongly insinuates that this is targeting commercial & industrial customers, rather than hobbyists.

A Cute Handheld Gaming Device That You Can Build In An Altoids Tin

March 21, 2025 by 10 Comments

The MintyPi was a popular project that put a Raspberry Pi inside an Altoids tin to make a pocketable gaming handheld. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest build to replicate anymore, but [jackw01] was still a fan of the format. Thus was born the Pi Tin—a clamshell handheld for portable fun!

Neat, huh? More pocket-sized than the Game Boy Pocket.

The build is based around the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which packs more power than the original Pi Zero into the same compact form factor. It’s combined with a 320 x 240 TFT LCD screen and a 2000 mAh lithium-polymer battery which provides power on the go.

There are also a pair of custom PCBs used to lace everything together, including the action buttons, D-pad, and power management hardware. Depending on your tastes, you have two main enclosure options. You can use the neat 3D printed clamshell seen here in beautiful teal, or you can go with the classic Altoids tin build—just be careful when you’re cutting it to suit! Files can be found on GitHub for the curious.

We love a good handheld project around these parts; it’s particularly awesome how much gaming you can fit in your pocket given the magic of the Raspberry Pi and modern emulation. If you’re cooking up your own little retro rig, don’t hesitate to let us know!

PiEEG Kit Is A Self-Contained Biosignal Laboratory

March 20, 2025 by 9 Comments

Back in 2023, we first brought you word of the PiEEG: a low-cost Raspberry Pi based device designed for detecting and analyzing electroencephalogram (EEG) and other biosignals for the purposes of experimenting with brain-computer interfaces. Developed by [Ildar Rakhmatulin], the hardware has gone through several revisions since then, with this latest incarnation promising to be the most versatile and complete take on the concept yet.

At the core of the project is the PiEEG board itself, which attaches to the Raspberry Pi and allows the single-board computer (SBC) to interface with the necessary electrodes. For safety, the PiEEG and Pi need to remain electrically isolated, so they would have to be powered by a battery. This is no problem while capturing data, as the Pi has enough power to process the incoming signals using the included Python tools, but could be an issue if you wanted to connect the PiEEG system to another computer, say.

For the new PiEEG Kit, the hardware is now enclosed in its own ABS carrying case, which includes an LCD right in the lid. While you’ve still got to provide your own power (such as a USB battery bank), having the on-board display removes the need to connect the Pi to some other system to visualize the data. There’s also a new PCB that allows the connection of additional environmental sensors, breakouts for I2C, SPI, and GPIO, three buttons for user interaction, and an interface for connecting the electrodes that indicates where they should be placed on the body right on the silkscreen.

The crowdsourcing campaign for the PiEEG Kit is set to begin shortly, and the earlier PiEEG-16 hardware is available for purchase currently if you don’t need the fancy new features. Given the fact that the original PiEEG was funded beyond 500% during its campaign in 2023, we imagine there’s going to be plenty of interest in the latest-and-greatest version of this fascinating project.

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“Glasses” That Transcribe Text To Audio

March 19, 2025 by 10 Comments

Glasses for the blind might sound like an odd idea, given the traditional purpose of glasses and the issue of vision impairment. However, eighth-grade student [Akhil Nagori] built these glasses with an alternate purpose in mind. They’re not really for seeing. Instead, they’re outfitted with hardware to capture text and read it aloud.

Yes, we’re talking about real-time text-to-audio transcription, built into a head-worn format. The hardware is pretty straightforward: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W runs off a battery and is outfitted with the usual first-party camera. The camera is mounted on a set of eyeglass frames so that it points at whatever the wearer might be “looking” at. At the push of a button, the camera captures an image, and then passes it to an API which does the optical character recognition. The text can then be passed to a speech synthesizer so it can be read aloud to the wearer.

It’s funny to think about how advanced this project really is. Jump back to the dawn of the microcomputer era, and such a device would have been a total flight of fancy—something a researcher might make a PhD and career out of. Indeed, OCR and speech synthesis alone were challenge enough. Today, you can stand on the shoulders of giants and include such mighty capability in a homebrewed device that cost less than $50 to assemble. It’s a neat project, too, and one that we’re sure taught [Akhil] many valuable skills along the way.

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