raspberry pi

1701 Articles

Instant Sketch Camera Is Like A Polaroid That Draws

November 28, 2025 by 12 Comments

These days, everyone’s got a million different devices that can take a passable photo. That’s not special anymore. A camera that draws what it sees, though? That’s kind of fun. That’s precisely what [Jens] has built—an instant sketch camera!

The sketch camera looks like a miniature drawing easel, holding a rectangular slip of paper not dissimilar in size to the Polaroid film of old. The 3D-printed frame rocks a Raspberry Pi controlling a simple pen plotter, using SG90 servos to position the drawing implement and trace out a drawing. So far, so simple. The real magic is in the image processing, which takes any old photo with the Pi camera and turns it into a sketch in the first place. This is achieved with the OpenCV image processing library, using an edge detection algorithm along with some additional filtering to do the job.

If you’ve ever wanted to take Polaroids that looked like sketches when you’re out on the go, this is a great way to do it. We’ve featured some other great plotter builds before, too, just few that are as compact and portable as this one. Video after the break.

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Damaged Pocket Computer Becomes Portable Linux Machine

November 28, 2025 by 36 Comments

The Sharp PC-G801 was an impressive little pocket computer when it debuted in 1988. However, in the year 2025, a Z80-compatible machine with just 8 kB of RAM is hardly much to get excited about. [shiura] decided to take one of these old machines and upgrade it into something more modern and useful.

The build maintains the best parts of the Sharp design — namely, the case and the keypad. The original circuit board has been entirely ripped out, and a custom PCB was designed to interface with the membrane keypad and host the new internals. [shiura] landed on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to run the show. It’s a capable machine that runs Linux rather well and has wireless connectivity out of the box. It’s paired with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller that handles interfacing all the various parts of the original Sharp hardware. It also handles the connection to the 256×64 OLED display. The new setup can run in ESP32-only mode, where it acts as a classic RPN-style calculator. Alternatively, the Pi Zero can be powered up for a full-fat computing experience.

The result of this work is a great little cyberdeck that looks straight out of the 1980s, but with far more capability. We’ve seen a few of these old pocket computers pop up before, too.

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One-Way Data Extraction For Logging On Airgapped Systems

November 27, 2025 by 50 Comments

If you want to protect a system from being hacked, a great way to do that is with an airgap. This term specifically refers to keeping a system off any sort of network or external connection — there is literally air in between it and other systems. Of course, this can be limiting if you want to monitor or export logs from such systems. [Nelop Systems] decided to whip up a simple workaround for this issue, creating a bespoke one-way data extraction method.

The concept is demonstrated with a pair of Raspberry Pi computers. One is hooked up to critical industrial control systems, and is airgapped to protect it against outside intruders. It’s fitted with an optocoupler, with a UART hooked up to the LED side of the device. The other side of the optocoupler is hooked up to another Raspberry Pi, which is itself on a network and handles monitoring and logging duties.

This method creates a reliable one-way transmission method from the airgapped machine to the outside world, without allowing data to flow in the other direction. Indeed, there is no direct electrical connection at all, since the data is passing through the optocoupler, which provides isolation between the two computers. Security aficionados will argue that the machine is no longer really airgapped because there is some connection between it and the outside world. Regardless, it would be hard to gain any sort of access through the one-way optocoupler connection. If you can conceive of a way that would work, drop it down in the comments.

Optocouplers are very useful things; we’ve seen them used and abused for all sorts of different applications. If you’ve found some nifty use for these simple parts, be sure to drop us a line!

A Bird Watching Assistant

November 25, 2025 by 21 Comments

When AI is being touted as the latest tool to replace writers, filmmakers, and other creative talent it can be a bit depressing staring down the barrel of a future dystopia — especially since most LLMs just parrot their training data and aren’t actually creative. But AI can have some legitimate strengths when it’s taken under wing as an assistant rather than an outright replacement.

For example [Aarav] is happy as a lark when birdwatching, but the birds aren’t always around and it can sometimes be a bit of a wild goose chase waiting hours for them to show up. To help him with that he built this machine learning tool to help alert him to the presence of birds.

The small device is based on a Raspberry Pi 5 with an AI hat nested on top, and uses a wide-angle camera to keep an eagle-eyed lookout of a space like a garden or forest. It runs a few scripts in Python leveraging the OpenCV library, which is a widely available machine learning tool that allows users to easily interact with image recognition. When perched to view an outdoor area, it sends out an email notification to the user’s phone when it detects bird activity so that they can join the action swiftly if they happen to be doing other things at the time. The system also logs hourly bird-counts and creates a daily graph, helping users identify peak bird-watching times.

Right now the system can only detect the presence of birds in general, but he hopes to build future versions that can identify birds with more specificity, perhaps down to the species. Identifying birds by vision is certainly one viable way of going about this process, but one of our other favorite bird-watching tools was demonstrated by [Benn Jordan] which uses similar hardware but listens for bird calls rather than looking for the birds with a vision-based system.

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Intel GPUs On Raspberry Pi Is So Wrong It Feels Right

November 14, 2025 by 15 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” →

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.

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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.