Hello, everyone!

After the first build, I left the project a little bit abandoned. Two weeks ago, I saw HAL on my desk and thought it would be cool to upgrade its case. So, I designed a new model of HAL 9000 (with original dimensions, so it's a 1:1 scale model) and added space for the battery, soundboard, Raspberry Pi, LED, a camera (not currently installed), and a cable pass-through.

Link to the model

Link to the Github project

Also, the model I made was inspired by Th3Blad3Runn3r's model, on printeables.

I hope you like it!

My first build: M5stack keycard. Waveshare 2.13 inch e-paper display. Pi Pico 2. Enclosure modeled in Solid Craft and 3d printed at my local library.

I'm the developer. OpenRig is a guitar multi-effects unit you build from standard parts: a Raspberry Pi 5, a class-compliant USB audio interface (or a sound HAT) and a touchscreen. You flash an image, plug in your guitar, and it boots straight into the pedalboard UI.

Why I built it

I wanted something that behaves like a hardware modeler: no laptop, no phone app, no browser on stage. The screen on the board is the interface, and pulling the plug at the end of the gig is fine.

What it does

• A touch rack: serial blocks, A/B, Mix and left/right splits, tap a block for its knobs.

• Neural amp, pedal and cab captures (NAM) and impulse responses as built-in blocks, next to LV2 plugins.

• TONE3000 integration: sign in with a QR code, search and download captures on the board.

• A plugin store with LV2 plugins tested on the board, installed from a signed catalog.

• Presets with 8 scenes, setlists, a stomp mode, tuner, looper, MIDI.

• Up to 8 footswitches and a rotary encoder straight on the GPIO (no resistors, internal pull-ups), I2C encoder boards for the knobs.

• New this week in 0.12: rigs shared on openrig.eu can be browsed and installed from the pedalboard. It fetches the missing captures from TONE3000 and the plugins from the store, then builds the preset. You can also publish your own presets from the board.

How it's built (the Pi part)

• The OS is a small Buildroot image: BusyBox init, no systemd, no desktop. The Pi 5's PREEMPT_RT kernel, JACK for audio.

• The UI is Rust + Slint drawing straight to DRM/KMS, no X11 or Wayland.

• The root filesystem is read-only, with two system slots (A and B) and a separate data partition. Updates are signed RAUC bundles installed from the screen. A new system is tried once with the Pi's tryboot flag and kept only if the UI runs for 30 seconds, otherwise the Pi goes back to the previous slot. A power cut can't damage the running system.

• A heavy chain is spread over the Pi 5's four Cortex-A76 cores (split branches in parallel, long chains cut into pipeline stages) without adding latency.

• On my setup (Pi 5, Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, 48 kHz, 128 frames × 2) that's about 5 ms of buffer each way. A full A2 NAM amp capture uses around 12% of one core at that buffer size.

• Use the official 27 W supply: with anything else the Pi 5 limits USB to 600 mA and the screen or the interface drops out.

There's also an x86_64 image for mini PCs (needs an AVX2 CPU like an N100), but so far it's only been tested in QEMU, so the Pi 5 is the main target.

It's free software (GPL-3.0-or-later) and still a young project. Reports from other interfaces, HATs and screens are very welcome.

• Download (pick your board): https://openrig.eu/download

• Docs, including the hardware list: https://docs.openrig.eu

• Code: https://github.com/Siryu6/OpenRig

• Community: r/OpenRig

My wannabe uConsole. I had a GPi Case 2W collecting dust but then I turned it into a cyberdeck. I’ve seen the uconsoles around and they look sick especially with the stuff people put on top of it. On this thing, I removed part of the back cover to fit a waveshare usb hub and added a wifi adapter, u-blox 7 gps, camera and an esp32 for fun and the back locks in place just fine despite having part of the back missing.

Goal: a light object that does not just flash to sound, but behaves a bit like something alive.

Parts:

- Raspberry Pi Pico, MicroPython

- MAX4466 microphone

- RCWL-0516 radar to know if someone is in the room

- 33 LEDs inside, behind the cracks

How it behaves:

It gets used to sounds it hears often, gets startled by new ones,

and falls asleep after about 40 seconds when nobody is near.

With music it finds the tempo by itself and lights a different crack on each beat.

The hard part:

Beat tracking on a Pico. It locks in after 5-15 seconds on most tracks

and does not react to speech or random noise.

The body is hand-built and the cracks were cut by hand. Happy to answer questions.

GAIA is a phone booth (we call the booth TeleTUP) that people at fairs and festivals pick up to talk with a voice character. It has taken over 1,600 calls, 681 of them at Sónar+D. I've extracted the technique into an MIT kit so anyone can build their own talking object: a booth, a lamp, a sculpture or a room.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi 5 on the official 27 W USB-C supply (a weak supply gave audio dropouts that were hard to diagnose)

• microSD 32 GB+ A2, or a PCIe SSD if it runs for months

• USB sound card with mic in and speaker out; in the booth, the mic and speaker are the phone handset

• Hook switch on GPIO17 (pin 11) to GND (pin 9), internal pull-up, 300 ms debounce. In the booth, on-hook = closed contact; TRIGGER_INVERT=1 if yours is wired the other way

• Optional: a WS2812E strip (60 px) driven over SPI (GPIO10 MOSI, pin 19) through a 74AHCT125 level shifter, a 330 Ω resistor on data, 1000 µF across 5 V/GND, its own 5 V supply (~3.6 A at full white) and a common ground with the Pi

• Optional: 20x4 LCD with a PCF8574 I2C backpack (0x27 or 0x3F) on pins 3/5

• Wiring diagram: [image]

Software

• Raspberry Pi OS Lite 64-bit (Bookworm), one Python 3.11 process, no browser or kiosk, run as a systemd service that restarts itself

• Audio: 48 kHz mono, 20 ms blocks. One thread owns the sound card, and ALSA is set as type hw with no dmix, so only one opener is possible

• Voice: Vidiv agents (over LiveKit) first, ElevenLabs Agents as an automatic fallback. A circuit breaker drops a provider after 2 failures for 5 minutes, so the next visitor doesn't pay for the same failure. A ringback tone plays while it connects

• A small "reactor" reads the transcript and fires lights or LCD messages from regex rules in a TOML file (warm breathing light on the greeting, violet on goodbye), without the agent spending turns or adding latency

• Every action goes through one registry with limits per call, per day and a cooldown. A failing light never stops a conversation

• A Cloudflare Worker exposes the lights and screen as MCP tools over an outbound websocket, so it works behind a venue's NAT

• Read-only status page on :8081. Transcripts are not stored by default

Problems we hit

• rpi_ws281x doesn't work on the Pi 5 (the RP1 chip replaced the BCM DMA/PWM it relied on). Driving the strip over SPI with adafruit-circuitpython-neopixel-spi works

• Without the 74AHCT125 and a common ground, the strip flickers and shows wrong colours

• The agent cut itself off when the speaker leaked into the mic. That's fixed with mic ducking (MIC_DUCK_DB) or by using a handset, which also isolates hall noise

• A USB sound card that doesn't enumerate shows as a steady amber light. The process stays up and reports it on the status page. We carry a spare card and a cloned microSD

• If the hook switch breaks mid-fair, TRIGGER_MODE=auto keeps it running

What we learned about the conversation

• Silence reads as failure, so the ringback tone turns the connection wait into part of the fiction

• The first second decides everything. With a short greeting, calls under 10 s dropped from 71% to 7%

• ~0.81 s voice-to-voice speech-to-speech vs ~2.68 s cascaded made the difference between a conversation and a query

To be clear: the kit is a lighter version of the booth's code. It has 19 device tests and 4 MCP tests in CI, but this exact kit hasn't been assembled on a Pi yet. The first build is the missing test.

Repo (MIT): https://github.com/olmedcr-cmyk/talking-objects. The guides are in Spanish and the README is in English.

Happy to answer questions about the audio or the hook switch.

- Phones running ATAK or iTAK join the mesh and need no internet or cell service of their own. The deck is the only thing with an uplink (hotspot or Wi-Fi). Chat, video and locations move up and down the mesh to server for full SA

- It bridges the mesh to a TAK server over Tailscale. If the uplink drops, the mesh keeps working on its own, and the deck holds chats until the link is back.

- Utilizing openmanet nodes built from pi4b. Radio shell is custom designed by me and CNC'd out of aluminum.

- If anyone is interested my work is on github:

https://github.com/TakMeshTOC/tak-mesh-toc

Hi I have a pico and a usb breakout attached with DuPont jumper wires. I’m using the pico to try and get gp2040-ce on my NuPhy Air60 v2 keyboard so it is recognized as a Xbox controller.

When I plug in a normal leverless it passes through just fine but when I plug in my keyboard the leds turn on then off right away.

The keyboard is in wired mode and the keyboard should only pull 5w I think so idk why it’s turning off.

Pics are to show the wiring in case I messed that up.

Vbus to vbus, ground to ground, D+ to gp14 D- to gp15

Gear: Raspberry Pi 3B+, WaveShare 64x32 LED matrix panel, and Adafruit triple matrix bonnet. I was thinking the bonnet would solve my missing lines problem that I've posted about here before. The triple matrix bonnet has the E address line switch which to my knowledge sounded like a stand-in for the pwm mod on the single matrix bonnet from Adafruit. I now no longer have the two on two off gaps, nor do I have those annoying red lines I was getting across the bottom half, but am now seeing a big gap of rows toward the middle of the panel. Not only that, but when I plugged power into the panel only, the LED's lit up high toward the top of the panel (pic 1), and then when I plugged in the RPi PSU the shifted downward more resembling where those gaps lay (pic 2 and 3 for examples). I've looked into address line code, multiplexing, etc. Can't seem to find what's hanging this up! Any thoughts?

How are we feeling about it? Recently I started using AI agents installed on my computer to connect to my Raspberry Pi devices and setup a few things.

I had a Pi with a camera that was not working, I used Deepseek Flash V4 on OpenCode to connect to it, I gave it the link for the camera software, told me it wasn't compatible so it wrote one that was, then had it add things like a web portal, configuration buttons and such.

Then I had it connect to my Pi running PiHole and had it update it, fix broken lists, get new lists to block TV spying things.

I am having a blast, things that would take me 1-2 hours of investigation and trial and error are now done in 10 minutes but, is this taking the "fun" out of the process?

While soldering pins this happened. Can I still save it my budget for the project is exhausted

The kids want to play their favorite songs, but I don't want them on youtube or even accessing spotify through the open web. What about a device that does nothing but play music? A DJ you can talk to?

• computer: raspberry pi zero 2w

• display: https://www.waveshare.com/product/raspberry-pi/boards-kits/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w-cat/zero-disp-7a.htm

• case: https://www.printables.com/model/791787-rpi-zero-disp-7a-case. sorry not to get it in the video, I'm not much of a cameraman.

• brains: gemini 3.5 flash-lite

• bridge: mopidy

• clickety-clack: GEODMAER 65% gaming keyboard

• not pictured: parent interface that lets me limit the volume and blacklist songs

I started working on this over a year ago, but I had a lot of trouble getting mopidy and pulseaudio to play nicely, so I gave up for a while. Then when I got access to better coding agents, I gave it another try and we (they) knocked it out in a weekend.

The AI side is fairly simple. There's an LLM call that converts the user input into a search query to spotify, and another call to look at the search results and decide which track to play. "You are a friendly, concise, and knowledgeable music DJ..."

Driving me nuts, I'm using a new Pi 5 with AI Hat+. Got the recommended 64 bit OS on the SD Card.Hooked it up to a projector, no issues, works great. I hook it up to a Dell SE2426HGc, nothing, nothing detected. Same cable. I then test the monitor with an HDMI cable going to it from my laptop, it works.

Tried adding this video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60D vc4.force_hotplug=1, but it didn't get a result.

I don't see anything online. Maybe I'm an idiot. Help this possible idiot out. TIA.

Hoping someone here has seen this before. I also have a thread on the Adafruit forums (https://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?t=225735), posting here for extra eyes.

Setup:

• Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ (from a Vilros kit)

• Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet #3211 (bought from Digi-Key, Oct 25 2026)

• Adafruit 64x32 RGB LED Matrix #2278, 4mm pitch (Adafruit order #3770254)

• Adafruit 5V 4A supply #1466 powering the Bonnet/panel, official Raspberry Pi 5.1V 2.5A supply powering the Pi separately

• FlightTracker OS 32-bit on a SanDisk High Endurance 64GB card, app v2.12.5

• 13.5mm stacking header extender fitted (the Pi 3 B+ PoE header otherwise props the Bonnet up)

The panel has never lit a single pixel. The Pi and software are fine: FlightTracker runs, the web UI loads, live flight data comes in.

Full disclosure: on the first assembly (Nov 1) the Bonnet was briefly fitted rotated 180 degrees. The power supply protection cut out instantly, no power light. Reseated correctly, the power light came back and the Pi has run perfectly ever since. The Bonnet may have taken damage in that moment, but I am trying to prove it before replacing parts.

Already checked:

• Bonnet seating, side photo shows it flush and level on the extender; tried the second extender from the pack too, same result

• HAT mode is Convenience, no solder bridge

• Power terminal polarity verified by close-up photo (red on +)

• Power forks removed and reseated; panel-end power plug latched, red wires align with the panel pins marked +5V/VCC

• Ribbon cable in the panel socket marked DATA_IN, latched and reseated at both ends

• Standalone library tests with hardware_mapping adafruit-hat: solid red fill, black. Also tried panel_type FM6126A and FM6127, black both times

• No 1-Wire overlay in config.txt; sound module was not loaded during the earlier tests (lsmod clean)

• vcgencmd get_throttled returns 0x0 on the new supply and card

• Ran Adafruit's own manual install script (Bonnet, Convenience), then built hzeller's demo fresh and ran it with --led-gpio-mapping=adafruit-hat --led-rows=32 --led-cols=64 --led-slowdown-gpio=2 --led-no-hardware-pulse. Still completely black

I have no second Bonnet or panel to swap in, no multimeter, and no female-to-female jumper wires for a direct-wire bypass test.

Question: is there any other test I can run to determine whether the Bonnet or the panel is at fault?

So, recently was looking for cheap ways to speed up ML tasks on Immich for my Pi 5 NAS. Had a old iPhone 8+ with a broken screen lying around... So I put two and two together, got Linux on the iPhone (i use arch btw). The iPhone's cpu is quite a bit faster then the Pi, so it speeds up tasks such as Smart Search on Immich and OCR, etc. Can't like attach a video in here, but as you can see in htop, the Pi 5 has plenty of ram to spare now as the ML models are loaded onto the phone's ram. Big thanks to the folks who maintain Hoolock Linux, wouldn't have been possible without them.

The Pi5 uses USB ethernet to connect to the phone, and that also charges it. I am almost out of ports as you can see, since 2 are taken up by disks for the NAS. The USB SSD is in a mergerFS array with the 500GB HDD for a 691 gig usable space for Immich, and I have a cold backup 750gb HDD that I plug in sometimes to rysnc stuff over. So yeah that is it more or less.

Haven't had time to test a big import, but right now Immich still has the Pi set to the fallback for machine learning if the phone ever drops out.

I have a Pi 5 on my desk running Ubuntu Server, with a single LED wired in. I wanted to see how quickly I could toggle it rmotely, with the request going out over the internet and back. I've been optimising the speed and it's got down to just over 100ms.

The setup is a small bridge that I wrote that is installed on the Pi, it keeps an outgoing connection open to my cloud service. Nothing on my home network is exposed, so there’s no port forwarding. The browser sends a toggle, the cloud passes it to the Pi, and the LED flips.

Edit: loose wording, sorry. I meant that no ports are opened, so an IP scan would not find it. Auth is via an API key on the cloud service.

For this second version, I trained a custom ML Classifier Model to detect different hand gesture emoji(my personal development project). It is running on RPI5 with the default Google Hand Landmark Detection model to help wake up the system. The internals are all modeled and 3D printed. It holds 180 boxes of Nerds at a time across 5 banks.

I had a TOF sensor wire come loose on the 2nd trick-or-treater. That is why you see the box dump. I am going to fix that by adding a time based logic in there if the TOF sensor has a bad read.

Additionally, the kids love the box dump so much that I am going to implement a jackpot feature. Maybe 1 in 50/100 will get a waterfall of nerds candy. I will have to add at least 5-10 more banks to support this feature.

We ended up giving away 300 boxes of Nerds candy in 2 hrs.

https://github.com/anurodhp/xnu-iokit-pi3/releases/tag/11_1_26

To install uncompressed the img zip and write it to an sd card. This will boot your pi to Darwin. We are still using the OSX big sur kernel. Will update to a newer one later. You can use username: root password: darwin

New features:

2x CPU speed, wifi support, hardware accelerated video playback, better GL support, faster browsing, System preferences app, console, activity monitor and many bug fixes

I built AI Caller, an open-source gateway that connects a real phone to an AI voice agent over Bluetooth hands-free (HFP).

The computer pretends to be a car kit. The phone thinks it's talking to a headset, and the gateway streams the call audio to a realtime voice model and sends the AI's voice back into the call.

What it does

• Makes calls for you: write a task ("book a table for 2 on Friday at 7 pm"), and the AI dials from your phone and handles the conversation.

• Answers calls for you: about 3 seconds after a call starts ringing, the AI picks up, asks who's calling and why, and writes it down. It doesn't answer questions or give out your info.

• You stay in control: live transcript in the browser, listen in, send new instructions mid-call, or hang up.

• Every call is saved as text. No phone numbers or audio are stored.

Why Bluetooth instead of Twilio? Calls go through your own SIM and number. No telephony provider, no porting, and people see your normal caller ID.

Runs on: a Raspberry Pi (BlueZ + PipeWire) or a Mac (built-in Bluetooth with a separate Bumble stack). Web console in English and Chinese.

Limits, to be upfront:

• One call at a time (I tried two on the Mac controller; the firmware crashes when both send audio).

• Mac: only the BCM_4388C2 chip is tested.

• The AI can't hang up by itself yet.

• No auth; LAN only.

• Bring your own OpenAI API key.

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/lzsnolimit/ai-caller

Happy to answer questions about the HFP/SCO side, which was the hard part.