A Very Tidy Handheld Pi Terminal Indeed

July 27, 2025 by Jenny List 25 Comments

As single board computers have become ever smaller and more powerful, so have those experimenting with them tried to push the boundaries of the machines they can be used in. First we had cyberdecks, and now we have handheld terminals. Of this latter class we have a particularly nice example from [Random Alley Cat]. It takes a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and a handful of other parts, and makes them with a 3D printed case into something very professional indeed.

One of the problems with these designs has always been tidily packing away all the parts with their cables, and it’s one she solves by making a chassis to hold all the parts, and a case which fits around that. In a stroke the case no longer has to provide a dual function, allowing for a much easier internal layout. Her screen is a Pimoroni Hyperpixel, the keyboard is an Xbox 360 accessory, and the power supply is an off the shelf Pi UPS board and battery.

We particularly like the accesses on the underside of this machine to access the Pi ports, and the ventilation holes and external case details. It’s not perfect, as she says in the video below it’s not the best Linux keyboard. but we could really see ourselves using this.

If you follow handheld cyberdecks, we have a few treats for you on these pages. Not all of them run Linux, for example.

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This image created using GPT-4o on Poe using the prompt “picture of an upright freezer connected to a computer for temperature monitoring, together with a graph and an alarm siren. Suitable for a professional blog. Be humorous and use a vintage theme.”

Freezer Monitoring: Because Ice Cream Is A Dish Best Served Cold

July 21, 2025 by John Elliot V 23 Comments

[Scott Baker] wrote in to let us know about his freezer monitor.

After a regrettable incident where the ice cream melted because the freezer failed [Scott] decided that what was called for was a monitoring and alerting system. We enjoyed reading about this hack, and we’ll give you the details in just a tick, but before we do, we wanted to mention [Scott]’s justifications for why he decided to roll his own solution for this, rather than just using the bundled proprietary service from the white goods manufacturer.

We’re always looking for good excuses for rolling our own systems, and [Scott]’s list is comprehensive: no closed-source, no-api cloud service required, can log with high fidelity, unlimited data retention, correlation with other data possible, control over alerting criteria, choice of alerting channels. Sounds fair enough to us!

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Convert Any Book To A DIY Audiobook?

July 6, 2025 by Dave Rowntree 12 Comments

If the idea of reading a physical book sounds like hard work, [Nick Bild’s] latest project, the PageParrot, might be for you. While AI gets a lot of flak these days, one thing modern multimodal models do exceptionally well is image interpretation, and PageParrot demonstrates just how accessible that’s become.

[Nick] demonstrates quite clearly how little code is needed to get from those cryptic black and white glyphs to sounds the average human can understand, specifically a paltry 80 lines of Python. Admittedly, many of those lines are pulling in libraries, and some are just blank, so functionally speaking, it’s even shorter than that. Of course, the whole application is mostly glue code, stitching together other people’s hard work, but it’s still instructive and fun to play with.

The hardware required is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a camera (in this case, a USB webcam), and something to hold it above the book. Any Pi with the ability to connect to a camera should also work, however, with just a little configuration.

On the software side, [Nick] pulls in the CV2 library (which is the interface to OpenCV) to handle the camera interfacing, programming it to full HD resolution. Google’s GenAI is used to interface the Gemini 2.5 Flash LLM via an API endpoint. This takes a captured image and a trivial prompt, and returns the whole page of text, quick as a flash.

Finally, the script hands that text over to Piper, which turns that into a speech file in WAV format. This can then be played to an audio device with a call out to the console aplay tool. It’s all very simple at this level of abstraction.

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An Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age

April 1, 2025 by Tom Nardi 13 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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Zerowriter Promises Zero Distractions While Writing

December 21, 2023 by Kristina Panos 15 Comments

As great as full-blown desktop computers may be for web surfing, gaming, and what have you, they are theaters of distraction when it comes time to write. And while there are machines out there purpose-built for writing, the price tags run awfully high for what they are, which is essentially a microprocessor handling a keyboard and an E-ink display.

So, why not build one yourself, then? That’s the idea behind the Zerowriter, which, as you may have guessed, is based on the Raspberry Pi Zero. The Zero 2 W to be exact: [zerowriter] says that the extra power over the original Zero is quite useful.

In addition, there’s a 4.2″ Waveshare E-ink display and the Vortex Core 40% keyboard inside the 3D-printed enclosure. The design is based on the Penkesu computer, although in the Zerowriter, the Pi sits behind the screen instead of underneath the keyboard. [zerowriter] built an application on top of the Waveshare demo program that’s easy to use and modify.

The price tag for this build comes in around $200, which is a fraction of similar commercial products. Most of the cost is in this particular keyboard, although 40%s are, broadly speaking, not cheap. We would love to see someone make a keyboard for this.

Looking to make something a bit bigger? Be sure to check out the MUSE.

A desktop weather display, with two yellow pointers, one for the time frame (Now, 3hr, 6hr, 12hr, 24hr, 48hr) and the other pointing to an iconographic description of the weather (sunny, cloudy, cloud with rain, cloud with lightning, snowflake and fog)

Let This Minimal Desktop Weather Display Point The Way

January 31, 2023 by Abe Connelly 7 Comments

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is currently in the middle of winter, so what better way to brighten a potentially gloomy day than to put this charming, minimalist weather display on your desk.

[Joe] has created a weather gauge that uses two servo motors to position mechanical pointers to indicate weather symbols and time ranges. The electronics consists of a push button and two SG90 servos driven by a Raspberry Pi Zero W 2. The case is 3D printed including the pointers attached to the servos and the button brim of the switch. The Raspberry Pi Zero W 2 is programmed to automatically connect to the OpenWeather API to retrieve the latest weather conditions, with the latitude and longitude being configured into the update script during the configuration and assembly stages.

[Joe] has provided extensive documentation about the build and software setup, in addition to releasing the source code and STL files for anyone wanting to make their own. [Joe] even offers kits for those who don’t want to go through the trouble of putting one together themselves — not that we imagine many in this particular audience would fall into that category.

We love to see these delightful weather builds and we’ve featured others in the past, like a converted weather house for weather prediction or a weather reporting diorama.

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A 3D-printed device labelled "BlixTerm" plugged into the back of a Commodore PET

BlixTerm Brings Full-Speed YouTube Video To The Commodore PET

July 1, 2022 by Robin Kearey 13 Comments

If you’ve ever used a home computer from the late 1970s or early 1980s, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the slow speed of their user interfaces. Even listing the contents of a BASIC program from RAM could take several seconds, with the screen updating one line at a time. Video games were completely optimized for speed, but could still handle just a few slowly-moving objects at the same time. Clearly, playing anything resembling full-motion video on hardware from that era would be absolutely impossible – or so you might think.

In fact, [Thorbjörn Jemander] has managed to persuade a Commodore PET to play YouTube videos at a completely reasonable 30 frames per second. He describes the process of designing the “BlixTerm” hardware and software in his video (embedded below), along with lots of useful information on how to push digital systems to their absolute limits.

Naturally, the PET needs a bit of assistance from modern hardware, in this case a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W hooked up to the “User” expansion port. The Pi connects to YouTube through WiFi and loads the requested video, then downconverts it to a 640×200 grayscale stream and transforms each frame to an 80×25 grid of characters, using those from the PET’s ROM that most closely resemble the pattern needed.

While it took quite some effort to squeeze enough performance out of the Pi to do all of this in real time, the trickiest bit was getting the resulting character stream into the PET’s video memory fast enough. To do this, [Thorbjörn] designed a special interface card with 2 KB of dual-port SRAM, which enabled the Pi to store its video frames as soon as they were ready on one side, and the PET to load them at its own pace from the other side. With just sixteen microseconds available to process each byte, the PET’s CPU can execute only four or five machine code instructions; barely enough to load and store a single character and jump to the next memory address.

The end result, as you can see in the video, is really impressive. Even within the constraints of the Commodore character set, the resulting image is clearly recognizable, while the frame rate seems to defy the hardware’s limitations.

If you’re a Commodore aficionado and wondering what the hell that weird PET 600 model is all about, [Thorbjörn] made a video about that too; it’s a rebadged 8296 aimed at the Swedish market. We’ve actually seen a project to generate live video on the PET before, although at a much lower frame rate. Thanks for the tip, [Keith Olson]!

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