Raspberry Pi

1916 Articles

One Lucky 3DS Gets A Switch-Style Dock

December 8, 2025 by No comments

The Nintendo Switch dock set a new bar for handheld docking user experience – just plug your console in to charge it, output image to your monitor, and keep it working with any USB peripherals of your choice. What if a 3DS is more your jam? [KOUZEX] shows off a Switch-style dock design for his gorgeous yellow 3DS, with Switch Pro controller support, and this dock wasn’t just a 3D printing job – there’s a fair bit of electronics to show, too.

While the 3DS looks stock at a glance, it has already been upgraded internally – there’s a USB-C capture card built in, half-ticking the “monitor output” requirement, and a Raspberry Pi board turns that output into HDMI. Building a charging dock is also pretty simple, with just two contacts on the side that desire 5V. Now, the pro controller support was a fair bit harder – requiring an internal modchip for emulating buttons, and trying out receiver boards for the Switch controller until a well-functioning one was found.

The build video is quite satisfying to watch, from assembling some QFNs onto tiny OSHPark boards using a hotplate and soldering them into the 3DS, to planning out, building, and dremeling some prints to create a true slide-console-into-dock experience, same way the Switch pulled it off. It even has the same USB-C and HDMI arrangement as the Switch dock, too! Want a simpler dock for your 3DS? Don’t forget that you can build a charger dock for yours with just a 3D print and a few wires.

Continue reading “One Lucky 3DS Gets A Switch-Style Dock” →

Intel GPUs On Raspberry Pi Is So Wrong It Feels Right

November 14, 2025 by 16 Comments

While you might not know it from their market share, Intel makes some fine GPUs. Putting one in a PC with an AMD processor already feels a bit naughty, but AMD’s x86 processors still ultimately trace their lineage all the way back to Intel’s original 4004. Putting that same Intel GPU into a system with an ARM processor, like a Raspberry Pi, or even better, a RISC V SBC? Why, that seems downright deviant, and absolutely hack-y. [Jeff Geerling] shares our love of the bizarre, and has been working tirelessly to get a solid how-to guide written so we can all flout the laws of god and man together.

According to [Jeff], all of Intel’s GPUs should work, though not yet flawlessly. In terms of 3D acceleration, OpenGL works well, but Vulkan renders are going to get texture artifacts if they get textures at all. The desktop has artifacts, and so do images; see for yourself in the video embedded below. Large language models are restricted to the not-so-large, due to memory addressing issues. ARM and RISC V both handle memory somewhat differently than x86 systems, and apparently the difference matters. Continue reading “Intel GPUs On Raspberry Pi Is So Wrong It Feels Right” →

The Pi 500 Turned Overkill Bluetooth Keyboard

November 13, 2025 by 12 Comments

Perhaps we’ve all found ourselves at one time or another with more computers in use than keyboards and other peripherals at hand to use them with. With a single user you can make do with remote terminals or by simply plugging and unplugging, but with multiple users it’s not so easy.

CNX Software’s [Jean-Luc Aufranc] had just such a problem involving broken keyboards and a forgotten wireless dongle, but fortunately he had just reviewed the latest version of the Raspberry Pi 500 all-in-one computer with the fancy mechanical switches. His keyboard solution is inspired but completely overkill: to use the full power of the compact Linux machine to emulate a Bluetooth keyboard.

At the heart of this hack is btferret, a Bluetooth library. Run the appropriate software on your Pi, and straight away you’ll have a Bluetooth keyboard. It seems there’s a bit of keymap tomfoolery to be had, and hitting the escape key terminates the program — we would be caught by that SO many times! — but it’s one of those simple hacks it pays to know about in case like him you need to get out of a hole and happen to have one of the range of Pi all-in-one machines to hand.

Pi Compute Modules Make For Compact Cluster

November 12, 2025 by 23 Comments

Raspberry Pi clusters have been a favorite project of homelabbers and distributed computing enthusiasts since the platform first launched over a decade ago, and for good reason. For an extremely low price this hardware makes it possible to experiment with parallel computing — something that otherwise isn’t easily accessible without lots of time, money, and hardware. This is even more true with the compute modules, as their size and cost makes some staggering builds possible like this cluster sporting 112 GB of RAM.

The project is based on the NanoCluster, a board that can hold seven compute modules in a form factor which, as [Christian] describes it, is about the size of a coffee mug. That means not only does it have a fairly staggering amount of RAM but also 28 processor cores to work with. Putting the hardware together is the easy part, though; [Christian] wanted to find the absolute easiest way of managing a system like this and decided on gitops, which is a method of maintaining a server where the desired system state is stored in Git, and automation continuously ensures the running environment on the hardware matches what’s in the repository.

For this cluster, it means that the nodes themselves can be swapped in and out, with new nodes automatically receiving instructions and then configuring themselves automatically. Updates and changes made on Git are pushed to the nodes automatically as well and there’s not much that needs to be done manually at all. In much the same way that immutable Linux distributions move all of the hassle of administering a system to something like a config file, tools like gitops do the same for servers and clusters like this, and it’s worth checking out [Christian]’s project to get an idea of just how straightforward it can be now.

Have A Slice Of Bumble Berry Pi

November 11, 2025 by 10 Comments

[Samcervantes] wanted a cyberdeck. Specifically, he wanted a Clockwork Pi uConsole, but didn’t want to wait three months for it. There are plenty of DIY options, but many of them are difficult to build. So [Sam] did the logical thing: he designed his own. The Bumble Berry Pi is the result.

The design criteria? A tactile keyboard was a big item. Small enough to fit in a pants pocket, but big enough to be useful. What’s more is he wanted to recycle some old Pi 3Bs instead of buying new hardware.

Continue reading “Have A Slice Of Bumble Berry Pi” →

Countdown To Pi 1 Loss Of Support, Activated

November 6, 2025 by 62 Comments

The older Raspberry Pi boards have had a long life, serving faithfully since 2012. Frankly, their continued support is a rarity these days — it’s truly incredible that an up-to-date OS image can still be downloaded for them in 2025. All good things must eventually come to an end though, and perhaps one of the first signs of that moment for the BCM2385 could be evident in Phoronix’s report on Debian dropping support for MIPS64EL & ARMEL architectures. Both are now long in the tooth and other than ARMEL in the Pi, rarely encountered now, so were it not for the little board from Cambridge this might hardly be news. But what does it mean for the older Pi?

It’s first important to remind readers that there’s no need to panic just yet, as the support is going not for the mainstream Debian releases, but the unstable and experimental ones. The mainstream Debian support period for the current releases presumably including the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS extends until 2030, which tallies well with Raspberry Pi’s own end-of-life date for their earlier boards. But it’s a salutary reminder that that the clock’s ticking, should (like some of us) you be running an older Pi.  You’ve got about five years.

Bit-banged 100 MBit/s Ethernet Transmission On Raspberry Pi Pico

October 18, 2025 by 25 Comments

The Raspberry Pi Pico is a very capable board, but it’s still a surprise to see bit-banged 100 MBit/s Fast Ethernet implemented on one. [Steve]’s Pico-100BASE-TX library allows an RP2040 (or RP2350) microcontroller to stream data at roughly 11 Mbyte/s, enough to implement 100 MBit/s Fast Ethernet transmission.

We’ve seen 10BASE-T implemented on a Pico, but it takes a lot more than just shoveling bits faster to get 100BASE-T working. 10BASE-T uses two voltage levels and Manchester encoding, but 100BASE-T uses three voltage levels, which [Steve] cleverly implemented on the Pico with two GPIOs, and far more complex encoding. Check out the repository’s README for details as well as a couple example applications.

[Steve] tells us that to the best of his knowledge, this is the first bit-banged 100 MBit/s Ethernet implementation using a microcontroller. It’s transmit-only — reception being an entirely different beast — but it’s possible some enterprising soul might find a solution. If you do, be sure to let us know all about it!