r/raspberry_pi

He is so amazing. Asked me for random parts over the past few months to go with his raspberry pi 5 we got him for Christmas.

I built the scaffold of a DnD site idea I had so his friend and he could all get notified when things happen in their campaign. My idea was a code based system so any kid with a browser could join the campaign and we don’t log anyone’s personal info. He took it and RAN with it.

It has culminated in this: a cyberdeck he built that runs LoreKeeper (our software, I didn’t know about Lorekeeper.com when I named it) and does all kinds of things. It uses an onboard LLM using Ollama to generate NPCs and other things. He’s bringing it to DnD club in Friday. Did I mention he’s 14? I had zero hand in any of this other than setting up the initial site and handing it over to him on GitHub.

Working on a small animal-detection system using a USB camera + Raspberry Pi + GPS module. The system detects animals through the camera and records their location coordinates using GPS.

Hello everyone!

I posted here last year, but that was last year. It's been a whole year (and some change) since then -- not to mention it's now the 3-year anniversary of when I started this project -- so I figured it was time to give you an update on my microSD testing project.

Before I dig in, a shameless plug for my Patreon.

Next, some quick stats:

• I have a total of 351 microSD cards in my collection -- spanning 111 models across 52 different brands. Of those:
  • I've tested 177 of them to the point of failure.*
  • I have 107 of them in testing right now.
  • The remaining 67 are sitting on the shelf, waiting for one of my card readers to free up.
• These cards have endured over 133 petabytes written.
• I've completed over 4.6 million program-verify-erase cycles on these cards.
• Breakdown by brand status:
  • Name brand: 163
  • Off-brand: 91
  • Knockoffs: 30
• Breakdown by authentic flash (a.k.a. not fake flash) vs. fake flash:
  • Authentic flash: 246
  • Fake flash: 35
  • Unknown: 3
• Breakdown by size (authentic cards only):
  • 128MB: 3
  • 4GB: 6
  • 8GB: 23
  • 16GB: 15
  • 32GB: 96
  • 64GB: 68
  • 128GB: 36
  • 256GB: 4

* A card is considered "failed" when either (a) it stops working completely, (b) it makes itself read-only, or (c) at least 50% of the sectors on the card have experienced verification failures.

Ok -- so who makes the most durable cards?

Because of the variety of cards that I have, it's hard to come up with a system that produces a definite answer here. Some of how I ranked these brands is going to be based on vibes. But...to try to narrow things down, I've grouped my cards into three groups:

• Industrial-grade: Cards that are specifically labelled as "industrial" or have "industrial" in their name. These cards typically come with a datasheet that includes an endurance claim.
• High endurance: Cards that are labelled as "high endurance" (or some similar wording). Manufacturers don't always put out datasheets for these cards, but they generally still make an endurance claim on the packaging.
• Consumer-grade: Basically everything else.

Consumer-grade cards:

The average consumer-grade card has lasted about 10,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. PNY. I have 10 of their consumer-grade cards: 3 PRO Elite Prime 64GB's, 3 Premier-X 128GB's, 3 Elite-X 64GB's, and one Elite 32GB. (I have 4 more of the Elite 32GB's that are waiting to be tested.) They've gone for an average of 643 days and 15,700 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 11.5PB to them in total. And with the exception of the one Elite 32GB -- they're all still going strong. On top of that, the PRO Elite Prime boasts some impressive performance -- every measurement I took was in the top 10% of all cards I've tested so far.
2. Kingston. I have 12 of their cards in this category -- 6 Canvas Go! Plus 64GB's (3 of the SDCG3's and 3 of the SDCG4's) and 6 Canvas Select Plus 32GB's. They've been going for an average of 694 days and about 23,500 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 11.6PB to them in total. The three Canvas Go! Plus 64GB (the SDCG3's) have all failed -- but the others are still going strong. The Canvas Select Plus's in particular have been troopers -- they're among the oldest cards in my collection, and they've been going for the better part of the last 3 years now (with no signs of letting up). Additionally, the Canvas Go! Plus 64GB's (the SDCG4's in particular) boast some impressive performance as well -- every measurement I took was in the top 7% of all cards I've tested so far.
3. Delkin Devices. I feel bad ranking Delkin so low on this list, because they've endured more data written to them per card, on average, than any other brand in my collection (in the consumer-grade category). The only reason I didn't rank them higher is because I only have one model -- the HYPERSPEED 128GB (of which I have 3). But they've done pretty well: they've lasted an average of 662 days and about 13,500 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 5.1PB to them in total. As a side note, these cards also got the highest random write speeds of any card I've tested.
4. Lexar. 3 cards dead, 5 still going. I have 3 Professional 1000x 64GB's (2 made by Micron, 1 made by Phison), 3 Blue 633x 32GB's (made by Longsys), and 2 E-Series 64GB's (with 3 more waiting to be tested). For those not in the know, the Lexar brand was sold to Longsys in 2017 -- and surprisingly, the Longsys-made cards are holding up better than the Micron-made cards. Overall, the Lexar cards have survived an average of 684 days and about 15,800 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 5.8PB to them in total.
5. Samsung. 3 cards dead, 7 still going. I have 3 EVO Plus 32GB's, 3 EVO Plus 64GB's, 3 PRO Plus 128GB's, and 1 P9 Express 256GB (with 2 more waiting to be tested). Of those, the three EVO Plus 32GB's and one of the PRO Endurance 32GB's are dead -- the rest are still going strong. Samsung's cards have lasted an average of 553 days and about 11,100 program/verify/erase cycles so far, and I've written about 7.2PB to their cards in total.

• Honorable Mention: Amazon Basics. I have four of the Amazon Basics 64GB's -- and they're all still going. They've been going for an average of 788 days and about 16,600 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 4.2PB to them in total. I honestly didn't expect Amazon Basics to be one of the top performers when I bought them...and yet, here we are.

High endurance cards:

Keep in mind, I've got less data here -- I had 237 cards that fell into the "consumer-grade" category, but only 30 that fell into the "high endurance" category. But here's the thing: they haven't really proven themselves to be significantly better for endurance than a lot of the cards I listed above -- in fact, in a lot of cases, they've been less reliable (and generally worse for performance as well). So keep that in mind as you read through the list below:

The average high-endurance card has lasted about 14,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. TEAMGROUP. I don't feel great about putting TEAMGROUP at the top of the list for a couple of reasons. First, I only have two of them in testing at the moment -- someone sent me a 5-pack of the TEAMGROUP High Endurance 64GB's, so I have 3 more of them waiting to be tested. Second, one of them started having issues with bad sectors right out of the gate, and has continued to do so ever since. (Those bad sectors only make up less than 0.001% of the total sectors on the card right now...but I still don't like it when a card starts to have issues like that as soon as you start using it.) But the data doesn't lie -- they've survived, on average, 404 days and about 17,300 program/verify/erase cycles, and they're still chugging along. I've written about 2.2PB to these cards in total.
2. Transcend. I have 3 of the 350V 64GB's -- and they're all still going strong. They've survived an average of 760 days and about 17,000 program/verify/erase cycles so far. I've written about 3.2PB in total to them (mostly due to their mediocre write speeds).
3. SanDisk. I have my issues with SanDisk...but again, the data doesn't lie. I have 7 SanDisk cards in this category: 3 High Endurance 64GB's, and 4 MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's. As of right now, all 3 of the High Endurance 64GB's and all but one of the MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's have failed. They lasted an average of 452 days and about 16,200 program/verify/erase cycles before failing (with the MAX ENDURANCE 32GB's lasting about twice as long as the High Endurance 64GB's). I've written about 4.7PB to these cards in total.
4. Samsung. Samsung's position at the bottom of this list has less to do with how reliable their cards are and more to do with how poorly their high endurance cards perform, particularly on sequential write speeds (relatively speaking). I have 3 of the PRO Endurance 32GB's -- one has failed, the other two are still chugging along. They've lasted an average of 822 days and about 18,800 program/verify/erase cycles so far. I've written about 1.8PB of data to them in total.

Industrial-grade cards:

Keep in mind, I have even less data here. Industrial cards are expensive, so they make up a much smaller portion of the cards I've tested: just 15 in total (so far). But on the upside -- there is sufficient evidence here to say "in general, industrial-grade cards do last longer than consumer-grade cards (and, by extension, high endurance cards)".

The average industrial grade card has lasted about 122,000 program/verify/erase cycles (so far).

1. Kingston. I have 3 Kingston Industrial 8GB's; of those 3, only one is still going. But they've been troopers: they've lasted an average of 779 days and about 141,600 program/verify/erase cycles. I've written about 3.4PB to these cards in total. (Only one consumer-grade card has come close to this number: I have one Hiksemi NEO 8GB that has lasted for about 143,800 program/verify/erase cycles so far. No idea how.) These guys do pretty well on performance too, especially write performance: their sequential write speeds are in the top 9% of all cards I've tested.

Who makes the worst cards?

There are a bunch of no-name brands out there. They're not hard to find. I'm not going to talk about them here -- I'm going to focus on brands you're likely to have come across.

Consumer-grade cards:

1. onn. I picked up four of their 32GB cards at my local Walmart -- and they were terrible for endurance. They only lasted an average of 40 days and 1,400 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 40TBW), with the best one of the four not even making it to 1,900 cycles. On top of that, every performance measurement I took came in the bottom half of all measurements I took.
2. ADATA. I picked up 3 of the Premier 32GB's; they only lasted an average of 236 days and about 2,350 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 74TBW) before they quit working.
3. Gigastone. I have not been impressed with Gigastone. I have 11 of their cards -- 6 Full HD Video 32GB's, and 5 4K Camera Pro 32GB's. They lasted an average of just 114 days and 4,845 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 133TBW) before they quit working.
4. Micro Center. I purchased 5 of their 64GB cards; they only lasted an average of 116 days and 3,421 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 214TBW) before they stopped working.
5. Silicon Power (a.k.a. SP). I purchased 9 of their cards -- 3 Elite 32GB's, 3 Superior 128GB's, and 3 Superior Pro 128GB's. Not a one of them made it to 4,000 program/verify/erase cycles before failing -- they came in at an average of 159 days and about 2,350 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 252TBW) before failing.

• (Dis)honorable mention: SanDisk. SanDisk represents the single biggest brand in my collection: I have 28 of their cards in this category (with 4 more on the shelf waiting to be tested). It's telling that of those 28, only 5 are still going (and one of them is in its death throes) -- especially when cards from so many other brands have far outlasted them. Many of them have died under circumstances any other card would have handled just fine -- a problem I've written about on my blog before. They've lasted an average of 384 days and 9,404 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 566TBW) so far.

High endurance cards:

1. Integral. I bought 3 of the Security 32GB's; the only managed to last an average of 100 days and about 5,600 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 173TBW) before failing. To be fair to them, the package did make an endurance claim that works out to about 2,850 program/verify/erase cycles -- and they did manage to almost double that. However, they didn't hold a candle to many of the other high endurance cards that I tested.
2. Kingston. This one was truly a surprise -- I bought 3 of the High Endurance 32GB's, and they only lasted an average of 143 days and about 8,300 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 258TBW) before failing. The product packaging didn't make an endurance claim; I had to hunt around on Kingston's website to find it. Their claim works out to about 5,100 program/verify/erase cycles, which they did manage to beat. But again, so many other cards managed to last so much longer -- hell, so many other Kingston cards managed to do so much better -- that I was surprised and disappointed when these failed so early.

Industrial-grade cards:

1. SanDisk. I bought 3 of the Industrial 8GB's. They only lasted an average of 234 days and about 20,000 program/verify/erase cycles (or about 160TBW) before failing -- and the only reason they lasted that long was because I let my program trudge through an nearly-unending string of I/O errors for months on end -- before they finally just gave up the ghost.

So yeah...that's all I have for now. Feel free to ask questions (although I'm at work at the time I'm posting this, so I may not have time to respond)!

Attached: pictures of part of my setup. Also, dog tax.

I was reapplying thermal pads on my 3 b+ (was having temp throttling issues) and my hand slipped and damaged this surface mount component. Could someone please inform me if the board is still capable of running my 3d printer safely?

I have a Uniden R8w (a Radar detector) and it talks to your phone over Bluetooth through an app called r/tach. There's no public documentation on the protocol anywhere, so I decompiled the app, captured some traffic, and figured it out.

It's all plain text once you know the format. Band, Frequency, signal strength, direction, voltage, GPS heading and speed. I wrote a python library so a Pi can read it all directly, and even included a nice little program (r8link-pair) that auto setups everything for you.

I didn't have a portable 12V power supply to test this outside, so I yoinked the battery out of my Neato D9 and wired it to a buck converter I found on the floor of my lab with some jumpers and duct tape. It powers the detector through its cigarette lighter adapter. Took about 15 minutes with junk I found in my apartment. The pi is running off of USB c connected to my laptop.

Protocol Write up: https://github.com/AegisX86/UnidenR8wlink/blob/main/PROTOCOL.md
Library: https://github.com/AegisX86/UnidenR8wlink
PyPi: https://pypi.org/project/r8link/

I only have one of these detectors and I only was able to test it on the one I had and my camera database is empty so that part of the docs is guesswork. If anyone has one of these with stored cameras I'd LOVE a hex dump :3

If you want to try it out, install it with pip install r8link

I saw these terminal-style cases at todays maker faire in Hannover. But staff at this booth was pretty busy so I didn’t ask them for the model name. The booth itself just used them, but wasn't about hardware, but coding for kids.

I tried ChatGPT, Google Image search but both just haluzinate about cases.

I have absolutely zero usecase. But I like it and I want one.

Hey everyone,
I’m have a little bit of experience with raspberry pies, not not much.
Now I wanted to try my luck with the pico, I got an old one from a friend.
My problem is fairly specific, but maybe one of you all can help me with this:
When I connect the raspberry pi with my pc, I get notified, that the usb port can’t supply enough power for the device, so I power power it with a small voltage board (idk if that’s the real name)

When I use the picos own usb to connect to my computer I get the „connect sound“ and it shows up in my device manager. I press the BOOTSEL button, but it doesn’t show up as storage

When I try to use Thonny to connect with the pico it shows up, but then I get the error, that the device is busy atm.

I don’t know if I have connected to pico the correct way.

Maybe one of you all can help me?

I originally set up my Raspberry Pi 4 (8GB) as a small headless server, but over time it has evolved into a combination of homelab, monitoring system, and IoT platform.

Current setup:

Raspberry Pi 4 Model B — 8GB

Ethernet connection

External storage for NAS/backups

Active cooling

Custom UPS powering both the Pi and router

64-bit Linux

Tailscale for remote SSH access

What I'm actually using it for

NAS and personal file storage

Backups

Pi-hole / DNS services

Docker and self-hosted services

System monitoring

CPU/RAM/temperature monitoring

Power-consumption experiments

Air-quality and environmental monitoring

Grafana dashboards

IoT and networking experiments

Security-related experiments

One of the things I'm most interested in is combining the homelab with physical-world sensor data.

I'm collecting environmental measurements such as air quality and temperature and visualizing the data over time with Grafana. At the same time, I'm monitoring the Pi itself, so I can see system resources, temperatures and other measurements alongside the environmental data.

The basic idea is:

Sensors → Raspberry Pi → data collection/storage → Grafana → historical analysis

I'm also experimenting with power measurements and different sensors, so the Pi is becoming both the system doing the work and the platform I use to measure and experiment with it.

Another important part of the setup is reliability. The Pi and router are connected to a custom UPS, so the network and server can continue operating during power cuts instead of immediately going offline.

The Pi is normally completely headless. I use Tailscale + SSH for remote access rather than exposing SSH directly to the internet.

I'm still expanding the system, but I like the fact that a relatively small Pi can simultaneously act as a server, monitoring system, data collector and IoT gateway.

I'd be interested in seeing what other people are doing with their Raspberry Pis beyond the usual projects. If you're running sensor monitoring or Grafana on a Pi, I'd particularly like to see how you're collecting and storing the data.

Hello everyone,

I’ve recently published an open-source project called WiFi Sense. It’s a system that uses a standard ESP32-S3 and a Raspberry Pi 4 to detect motion and presence through walls by extracting raw WiFi Channel State Information (CSI).

How it works:

Unlike traditional radar solutions, this system uses standard 20MHz WiFi bandwidth. The Raspberry Pi sends a steady stream of data to the ESP32, which captures the CSI from the packets. This data is then sent back to the Pi via an encrypted nRF24 radio link to avoid interference. On the Pi, the system analyzes the signal to find human movement, which causes measurable shifts in the radio waves.

Capabilities:

  - Detects movement like walking or gesturing through walls made of wood, glass, or plasterboard.

  - Detects the presence of a motionless person just by monitoring their breathing rate.

  - Operates in complete darkness without using any cameras or optical sensors.

I have documented the full architecture, as well as the engineering challenges and physical limitations of the project.

Repository: https://github.com/The-Masked-Bear/wifisense-pi

I'd welcome any feedback on the approach or the architecture. Happy to answer any questions.

Mounted an old Raspberry Pi on the kitchen wall running an app I built to replace our MagicMirror setup that kept breaking. Figured this sub might like seeing a Pi doing something as a real, always-on household fixture instead of a project that gets built once and shelved.
It shows:
• A shared family calendar that syncs with Google, Outlook, and iCloud calendars
• A chore chart the kids can tap to check off on the touchscreen
• Rotating family photos
• Weather, a shopping list, and if you’ve got Home Assistant, it’ll show and control smart home stuff too
It’s a full self-hosted app, runs on the Pi itself, doesn’t depend on a cloud service to keep working. One line install script if you want to try it on a spare Pi you’ve got sitting around (I know most of us have at least one). It’s free to try through the end of the year. I’m not trying to make money off this, just trying to cover the actual costs of keeping it running, not looking to profit. Mainly looking for people to actually run it on real hardware and tell me what’s clunky or broken. If you’ve already got a touchscreen Pi setup or an old tablet to add as a display, it will work with that too!

It’s called PiazzaHQ and you can check it out at piazzahq.com and get your free account.

Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.11 just came out. It's mostly a reliability and safety update.

Key changes:

• Imager now takes an exclusive lock on drives when writing on Linux and Windows. This should prevent accidental writes from other processes.
• Support added for the rpi-preseed first-boot customization format.
• Accounts created through rpi-preseed are now always added to the sudo group.
• Multi-frame .img.zst images are now supported.
• Compute Module users get a new Erase command for Fastboot, plus better device identity checks.
• Several fixes, including UASP storage detection and DiskArbitration handling.

Full changelog here: https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager/releases/tag/v2.0.11

I'm very slowly building an apocalypse cyberdeck.

* Raspberry Pi 5 8Gb (visible in pic)

* 8" DSI screen 2S4P 18650 power bank (battery holders visible in pic)

* acrylic enclosure (pieces visible in pic)

* i2c multiplexer HAT (90° angle, visible in pic)

* 868Mhz LoRaWAN HAT

* RTL SDR Blog v4

* loads if i2c sensors

* NoIR cam

* IR illuminators

* DIY keyboard matrix on a Pico (WiP, on-screen keyboard will obscure text area on Meshtastic/MeshCore software)

* 4x i2c mini OLEDs for sensor data

Gonna be a huge project.

POWER: so the power bank will be charged via a 2S charge module and seperate balance board. I have a spoofer module thing to request 9v from USB C chargers. The 2S charge module can take multiple voltages, so I'll also add a 12V barrel jack for multiple charging options. The power bank will connect directly to an 8A buck module that I can set to 5.1V, and I'll add a few extra capacitors for voltage smoothing. With a couple tweaks to eeprom and config I'll block the low power warnings, and unlock max USB port power. Plus a couple of the USB things will be powered directly via the buck module to ease any strain on USB power.

I'll let you know when it's done... in a few months 😅

This week I set out to see how minimal I could make a web server. I've run simple web servers on a PinePhone and on a Raspberry Pi. This week I tried out running a website on the Pico W (the wireless-enabled version).

It involved a few glitches early on, mostly due to blocking sockets and needing to accept multiple connections in parallel. After a little tinkering, I've got it working and it appears to be stable. My Pico W has been running my website/blog for the past 24 hours with no problems and has served up over 500 pages to the public Internet.

The Python code for running the web service is on Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/thejessesmith/Pico-httpd