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▲ 5 r/raspberryDIY+2 crossposts

Raspberry Pi 3b+ Questions

Building a device heavily based on the Video Looper from videolooper.de and I have a couple questions.

I'm going to build it as is from the site, but with a couple addons. I want to add, in order of importance:

- a fan to run in the enclosure. I'm gonna get a 5v one from adafruit, which is where I am getting the board from. I'm also gonna pick up a small heatsink from them and a 5v 2.5A switching supply.

- a small color display, not touch, that will be mounted to the case I'm going to 3d print for the device. I would like this display to be as cheap as possible as it is just for monitoring video feed. I will be putting the device into Analogue mode to use the audio jack as a video output.

- a handful of buttons added to the case for powering down and the minimal functionality the device has about 4 or 5 functions: skip, stop/start, esc, and power. In the code these are set to keystrokes for a keyboard.

For the first, I already know how I'm going to set these up. The fan would go into the two 5v ports on the pin array. The questions I have are about the screen and the keys.

For the monitor, which screen should I get and how would I hook it up to the board? Would I need to add or change any of the code to get it working?

For the keys would it be fairly easy to just set up some simple electronics buttons or should I make a small 5 key keyboard that plugs into the device when I need it, which wouldn't be too often.

If anyone is willing to skim over the project details on the site I linked above and give me their thoughts and opinions I would greatly appreciate it. This is my first Raspberry Pi project, so I want to make sure so do things right. For reference I do have a soldering setup and have assembled custom boards before, like the CHA/V, VGA4EVA, and the feedback device from LofiFuture. It's just that coding makes me miserable so I want to get this device working as well as I can without having to do too much coding.

reddit.com
u/ALeakySpigot — 23 hours ago
▲ 3 r/raspberryDIY+1 crossposts

Poe hat not powering pi

Hey guys, new to the pi world.

Got this Poe hat to power up my pi but can not get it to work.

I’ve used a switch with Poe, and two different Poe injectors and can not figure out what I’m doing wrong.

If anyone has any ideas it would be greatly appreciated.

u/NoPomegranate5305 — 1 day ago
▲ 144 r/raspberryDIY+4 crossposts

Tiny Terminal

Made my pi zero running Pi OS and waveshare 2.13 e ink v4 display into a tinyterm powered by pisugar 3

u/Grand-Tart1203 — 2 days ago
▲ 10 r/raspberryDIY+5 crossposts

Planned upgrades: * Raspberry Pi 5 — 16 GB RAM as the main controller * 🖥️ Add an onboard display/screen * 🗣️ Add an AI speaking and voice-interaction system * 🚶 Develop a walking system * 🛞 Add stronger wheels for improved movement and stability * ⚙️ Upgrade the mechanical system

[deleted]

u/Personal-Wear1442 — 1 day ago
▲ 26 r/raspberryDIY

I recreated an Etch A Sketch (drawing toy) with Raspberry Pi Pico

Hi everyone!

For the last 2 months, I’ve been learning raspberry pi pico, electronics, soldering, CAD software, and more to remake a mechanical drawing toy I found in my drawer:) On the second image you can see the insides of it.

Hardware is really fun, and I enjoyed the process so much. Finally, I got everything working, and it just looks very cool in my opinion.

Also, if you are interested, I made a whole video about the creation process, challenges and how it works.

https://youtu.be/IhqKNODgfBE

Code is available on my github page

I'd love to hear your feedback and what you think about it!

u/SnooShortcuts871 — 2 days ago
▲ 920 r/raspberryDIY+4 crossposts

I built a picture frame that shows my friend group's Letterboxd reviews the moment they post them. My family is obsessed with it.

So this started because my friends are genuinely funny on Letterboxd and it felt wrong that their reviews just scroll away into nothing.

Now there's a frame in our kitchen that shows one review at a time, big, like it's art. The poster on the left, their stars and their little writeup on the right. It looks like a printed page in a frame, not a screen. There's NO glow, so it's perfect for movie nights. Guests do not clock it as a screen until it changes in front of them, which has this really cool ink dithering effect.

It rotates all day on its own. Someone logs a movie at the theater and their review is on our wall before they're home. My friend gave Spider-man 2 a four and a half stars with the review "god bless Spider-man 2" and that hung in our kitchen like a museum piece for two hours. That's the whole product honestly.

I had some fun building this and coded in some additional features. Chiefly: it remembers. A year to the day after you watched something, that old review comes back around. We've had dinner arguments start because the wall decided to bring up somebody's 2025 take on a movie they now claim they always loved. It keeps receipts.

It does other stuff too.

  • My friends and I all rank our 2026 release watches. So now, you can put a whole ranked list up when you're feeling brave for other's to judge.
  • There's a movie night mode, where you can display a selected movie or randomly choose one from your friend group's watch list, along with everyone's ratings (of those who have seen it).
  • You can ask Alexa to change it when you don't like the review that's up, which was supposed to be a joke feature and is now the most used one.

"Alexa, ask matinee to cycle"

"Alexa, ask matinee what's now showing"

  • And there's a page in the little app that shows every review the wall has ever displayed, which has become a nice little history book.
  • I'm still dreaming up more features!

I live in California now but am from Michigan, and this has been a fantastic way to stay engaged with my friend group back home.

How I built it is in the comments for anyone who wants that.

Real question though: a couple friends keep saying they want one and I can't tell if they're being polite.

Would you actually hang one of these in your place?

u/bashslam5927 — 4 days ago
▲ 33 r/raspberryDIY

Travel Pi Zero 2W ePaper Dashboard

I need to supply my desk with dashboard to switch it on and off occasionally. No wires, just some data in my bag. At the same time, I need to assemble all my Zero shields in one device to play around.

These two reasons inspired me to design the travel box for my Pi Zero 2W tower.

Shields:

  1. UPS-Lite v1.2 803040 (1000 mAh).
  2. Waveshare USB/LAN hub (3 + 1) RJ45.
  3. Waveshare 2.15 ePaper hat (black, white, red).
  4. Pi Camera Zero v22 OV5647 (2592x1944 10-bit GBRG).

Details:

  1. No SD card slot. I rarely change or reinstall OS.
  2. Holes are bigger than they could be to suit all possible wires.
  3. FreeCAD parametrized model (what a nightmare to use the software, nevertheless I continue).
  4. One USB port is sacrified to install camera.
  5. Switcher is not easy to manipulate, but any toothstick or tiny screwdriver helps immediately.
  6. When it is possible, I prefer LAN over WiFi to connect with SSH. So, one of shields is exactly for this purpose.
u/olgampavlova — 3 days ago
▲ 3 r/raspberryDIY+1 crossposts

Built a self-hosted bird + bat call ID system on a Pi

Over the past year I’ve been building a self-hosted system that listens to my backyard 24/7, IDs bird calls with BirdNET, and does bat echolocation detection on a second mic. It runs entirely on my own hardware — Raspberry Pi 5 on the listening end, a Docker container on my home server doing the actual processing and serving a web app I can hit from my phone or laptop.

What started as “I want to know what’s making noise outside my window” has turned into a genuinely full app at this point — a real dashboard, a life list, statistics, a field guide that pulls in eBird/Cornell Lab data for what’s actually likely in my area this time of year, note-taking on individual recordings, push notifications, the works. It integrates with iNaturalist so I can submit real observations straight from a detection. I’ve been slowly adding more devices too — a Bird Buddy feeder, a Haikubox — so it’s turning into more of a “one place for everything happening in my yard” system than just a bird ID tool.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of how the detection pipeline itself works — there’s a patent application in progress on part of it, so I want to keep that side close to the chest for now — but the app around it, the whole experience of actually using this thing day to day, is something I’d genuinely love another set of eyes and hands on. I’m one person building this in my spare time, and there’s a lot more I want to do with it than I can get to alone.

Screenshots below — dashboard and the statistics page, just to give a sense of where it’s at.

https://preview.redd.it/y1kk5s5cpyjh1.jpg?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e1211f59dcea526c25bae285dec97f1ff268b40e

Statistics page on Desktop

If you’re the kind of person who likes this stuff — self-hosted homelab projects, birding, bioacoustics, or just messing with a Pi for something more interesting than another Home Assistant dashboard — I’d love to talk. Not looking for anything formal, just people who want to dig into a real project with me. Comment or DM and we can figure out what that looks like. Or even if you just want to learn more!!

reddit.com
u/joshsalvi — 3 days ago
▲ 9 r/raspberryDIY

Built a headless MQTT + Node-RED gateway on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

Built a headless MQTT + Node-RED gateway on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

Been running a lightweight edge IoT gateway on a Pi Zero 2 W — completely headless, no monitor ever attached.

Stack:

Mosquitto MQTT broker (with proper username/password auth, no more allow\_anonymous)

Node-RED + Dashboard 2.0 for flows and a live web UI

Avahi/mDNS + static IP for reliable headless access

A custom SSH welcome banner showing live RAM/CPU temp/uptime because why not

Publishing sensor data to a Node-RED gauge is as simple as one mosquitto\_pub command from anywhere on the network. Whole setup fits comfortably on a Zero 2 W with room to spare.

Full write-up + all commands are in the README: ,

https://github.com/kritishmohapatra/pi-iot-gateway

Happy to answer questions if anyone's setting up something similar.

u/OneDot6374 — 3 days ago
▲ 8 r/raspberryDIY

Novice question

I'm trying to do my first rspberry pi project. I got raspberry pi 3b+, 2.7" e-Paper HAT display and BME680 sensor.

I just can't get my head aroud how to connect BME680 sensor if my 40pin connector on raspberry is taken by the hat display? Do I solder BME680 connections on other side of raspberry? Or is there better way to do this?

I am just trying to do simple environmental monitoring gadget and keep et as compact as possible.

u/Equivalent-Bad-2179 — 3 days ago
▲ 28 r/raspberryDIY

I built my own Raspberry Pi internet radio after years of using Pi MusicBox

For years, I used Pi MusicBox on my Raspberry Pi. I always loved the idea of a simple internet radio that you could just flash onto an SD card and run.

Over time, Pi MusicBox became outdated, so I started looking for a replacement. I checked out several other projects, but I couldn't find a modern solution that gave me that same simple, plug-and-play experience.

That's when I thought: why not build it myself?

That is how ZmartRadio was born.

The first version was very basic—it could only play internet radio streams. Since then, I've added an alarm clock, a sleep timer, and better support for the Raspberry Pi's various audio outputs. For example, ZmartRadio can now use HDMI audio, allowing you to connect the Pi directly to a TV if you don't have an amplifier or speakers connected to the audio jack.

One thing I realized while researching other setups was that smart home integration is a must-have nowadays. That's why I built Home Assistant integration for it via HACS.

Because of this, the radio is very flexible. You can control it over your local Wi-Fi using your TV, smartphone, tablet, Home Assistant dashboard, or even a Home Assistant mobile widget on your phone's home screen. :P

I have successfully tested it on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, and a Raspberry Pi 5 (16GB).

ZmartRadio runs on Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit), based on Debian Bookworm. In Raspberry Pi Imager, select Raspberry Pi OS (other) → Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit). I specifically wanted to keep the base installation lightweight, so there is no need for the full Raspberry Pi OS Desktop version. After installing Raspberry Pi OS Lite, ZmartRadio installs and configures the components it needs.

Honestly, one of the hardest parts was keeping the project simple. It's very easy to experience feature creep, but that wasn't what I wanted. I didn't want to build another Spotify, Apple Music, or Bluetooth audio player. I wanted ZmartRadio to do just one thing well: internet radio.

Once installed, you can use the web interface to find radio stations from all over the world by country, region, genre (like jazz), or simply by searching for the station's name. I've also added features like favorites and recently played stations.

I'm sharing it here because it turned into a really fun project, and I'd love to hear what the community thinks. If anyone wants to try it out, I would really appreciate feedback on what works well and what could be improved.

I am especially focused on keeping it lightweight, so I’m also very curious: what features do you think I should not add? 🙂

Project page:
https://zmartsolutions.nl/zmartradio

Home Assistant integration on GitHub:
https://github.com/ThinkZmart/home-assistant-zmartradio

u/ThinkZmart — 4 days ago
▲ 6 r/raspberryDIY+1 crossposts

A camera that describes what it sees — with no internet at all.

I built a camera in the shape of a Mamiya RZ67 that runs vision-language models completely offline on a Pi 5. Press the shutter, and it answers your custom prompt with a single sentence about what it sees. No internet, no cloud, no API keys.

GitHub: https://github.com/feeeeely/ai-camera

You can swap between models on the device itself and compare how differently they describe the same scene: Qwen3-VL (2B), MiniCPM-V 4.6 (1B), InternVL3.5 (2B), SmolVLM2 (2.2B), Moondream 2 (2B) and Ministral 3 (3B) turning the description into the final sentence. The prompt is editable on the touchscreen, so the same camera can do dry one-liners, museum labels or plain inventory notes.

After each shot it shows total time, input→output tokens, tok/s and a vision / generate / load breakdown. The token counts turned out to be the most interesting part: the same photo becomes ~145 image tokens on one encoder and over 1300 on another, which is a bigger factor in latency than the text generation itself.

A few things I learned the hard way:

- Moondream returns sometimes empty responses on current Ollama versions.
- qwen3-vl:2b is a thinking-only variant — it burns the entire token budget on invisible reasoning and returns nothing visible. You need the -instruct tag.
- Ollama can't load separate mmproj files, so a lot of GGUF vision models from HuggingFace simply won't run, no matter how you name them.

Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5 (16 GB), Raspberry Pi HQ camera with a 6 mm CS-mount lens, 4.3" DSI touch display, stainless steel shutter button, Waveshare UPS HAT with four 21700 cells. Runtime per photo is 30–60 seconds with the models kept warm in RAM. Happy to answer questions about the setup.

I'm coming from photography, I'm not a developer — the code was written with heavy AI assistance, and I did the hardware integration, debugging and model testing myself. Feedback on the implementation is very welcome.

u/fox_in_crocs — 4 days ago
▲ 0 r/raspberryDIY

Ajuda , tela não liga ?

Alguém ajuda , a tela não dá sinal , comprei da china e venho até sem marca nem nome no chip , tô achando estranho , quero usar ela no raspberry pi zero 2 w , com HDMI , mais não dá sinal nem apertando botão

u/NPCforxbox — 4 days ago
▲ 29 r/raspberryDIY+1 crossposts

Simple Weather Display with Console

https://github.com/prtk1910/rpi-weather-display

Simple weather display with a spare 3.5 inch screen and a Pi 3B, along with a management console for some quick settings

I might swap it out for a larger e-ink display for better legibility, but should replace my daily Alexa weather asks :)

Edit: Also added integration for pulling events in San Francisco from the RSS feed at sf.funcheap.com. Feel free to tune as per your location!

u/AidingAids — 6 days ago
▲ 123 r/raspberryDIY

Home Network Adblocker Question

i'm working on my first project, and I wanted to build an ad blocker for my home network. I already am purchasing a 3B+ with the power supply and microSD from PiShop. My big hurdle right now is finding a display that I can put on it and a case to go along with it. I generated a photo for a proof of concept for an idea of what I'm going for. If anyone has any ideas on where to find a display and case that will help me achieve this, that would be awesome. It's my first project, so I'm in a little over my head, but I would feel so good if I pulled this off.

u/Artistic_Pirate_6413 — 8 days ago