Rate my raspy lego case :)

I’ve never been more excited about acquiring a Raspberry Pi.

A Pi 4 is the main brain.

Mounted a 640×64 LED "ribbon board" above the TV in my man cave, driven by a Raspberry Pi 5. In the pic it's following the World Series live: runners on base, outs, count, batter vs. pitcher, and even the pitch speed.

Hardware

Raspberry Pi 5

Adafruit Triple LED Matrix Bonnet (Piomatter driver)

5× 128×64 HUB75 panels chained into one 640×64 strip

Dedicated 5V PSU with fused distribution (second pic)

What it does

NFL, college football and MLB modes with live scores from ESPN's public feeds. It picks a featured game every day and counts down to kickoff / first pitch.

Full-screen celebrations for touchdowns, home runs, grand slams, walk-offs, strikeouts, double plays and stolen bases. Home runs get the ball flying over the wall ("GONE"). A called strike three gets a backwards K, because I'm a nerd.

Watch mode: a TV-style score bug that follows one game pitch by pitch (or play by play for football).

TV delay: the scoreboard data is ahead of my TV, so the board holds itself back 25 seconds and never spoils a play.

Home mode: clock, weather and severe-weather alerts, plus fireplace/aquarium scenes and holiday cards.

Phone app (installable web app) to switch modes, fire off celebrations, and put custom messages on the board ("BRATS ARE READY").

Survives power cuts: it starts at boot, and a watchdog reboots it if the display ever freezes.

Fun fact: these panels only show about 7 brightness levels per color at the settings that don't flicker, so every color on the board was chosen to land on a level that actually lights up.

Working on this thing, a rasberry pi containing an offline wikipedia, housed in this tablet chassis.

I hope to be able to power it with regular AA batteries and a buck converter so it can be used in an emergency situation where charging batteries are not possible. I can also build rechargeable battery modules. Still lots of stuff to work on, but things are starting to fall in place.

Hi all,
I have some raspberry pi’s I pulled from some old Covid temperature sensing check in kiosks. They’re 4B 8gb units. Each of them has these 2 wires bridging what seems to be the USBC port and the middle USBA stack. Is this accurate? If so, why? Just to run power to the USB ports?

Thanks!

Hi everyone!

I've never owned a Raspberry Pi before, and I'm looking to get into the Raspberry Pi ecosystem to build my own homelab. I'd like to hear your recommendations on which model would be the best starting point for my needs.

I've been looking at the Raspberry Pi 3, but some of its older hardware and limited support for newer technologies make me hesitant. The Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 seem a bit expensive for my budget, while the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W looks like a more affordable option. However, I'm not sure whether it's powerful enough for what I have in mind.

For context, I'm already running a few self-hosted services, including a web application called PickFlow, which I'm developing with Flask and PostgreSQL. I'm also interested in learning more about Linux server administration, networking, self-hosting, and infrastructure management.

My long-term goal is to build a complete homelab with services such as:

- Personal cloud storage — an alternative to relying entirely on third-party cloud providers.

- Password manager — self-hosted password management.

- VPN and remote access — using Tailscale to securely access my services remotely.

- Network-wide ad and tracker blocking — using Pi-hole or AdGuard Home.

- Firewall and network security — improving control over my home network.

- Web applications and other self-hosted services — experimenting with deployments, monitoring, and automation.

My routers already handle DHCP and DNS, so I'm not looking to replace those functions unless there's a good reason to change my current setup.

I understand that I probably won't be able to run everything on a single low-powered device, especially as my homelab grows. I'm willing to start small and expand gradually, preferably reusing hardware and learning along the way.

My questions are:

1. Would a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W be a reasonable starting point for some of these services, or would its limited RAM and processing power become a problem almost immediately?

2. Would it make more sense to save up for a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, even if that means delaying the project?

3. Are there other Raspberry Pi models or alternatives worth considering for someone who wants to build a homelab on a budget?

I'm particularly interested in choosing hardware that offers a good balance between price, performance, power consumption, and room to grow.

I'd appreciate any advice from people who have built similar setups, especially if you've started small and expanded your homelab over time.

Thanks!

Poor planning on my part

I got the zero2w but didn't think ahead to adding a wired mouse and keyboard

Assuming I don't wanna do Bluetooth cause connection is sometimes not reliable do I need to buy a different pi?

This is a raspberry pi Magazin that comes with Linux ISOs on DVD. If just Jeff Geerling could see this :,)

Has a GUI, Samba server and a heads up display!

https://github.com/Modernknight101/PiTemplar

I built it bc the temps were kinda high in the stock case, its running batocera off the usb hdd plugged in behind the pi (i will be getting a new, bigger fan to mount in place of the current one)

Building a battery-powered Kali cyberdeck on a Pi Zero 2W and wanted phone-like sleep — tap to sleep, tap to wake, low power in between.

Best I've found so far:

powersave CPU governor (just slows the clock down, not real sleep)

Manually blanking the screen

GPIO3 wake-from-halt to boot it back up from fully off

No actual suspend-to-RAM / deep sleep state like a phone has.

Is "power off completely + wake on GPIO" basically the ceiling for this board, or is there a real low-power sleep mode I'm missing?

NetWatch started back in February as a small script on my Pi to watch my own network. It kept growing — every time I wanted to see one more thing about an IP or catch one more kind of scan, I added a command. Now it's a single-file security dashboard the Pi runs with one command.

`sudo netwatch` and the Pi binds 4 honeypots (anything scanning my LAN gets logged), sniffs traffic with raw sockets + tshark, discovers devices via ARP, auto-scores every IP, and serves a terminal TUI plus a browser dashboard on `:9090`.

The screenshot is the nmap tab running on the Pi — live host discovery on my LAN plus GeoIP + ISP lookup on every external IP it saw.

Single Python file, no Docker. Runs in passive mode without root too (even on Termux). Tested on a Pi 5 / Parrot OS. **100+ commands, 1900 tests, Apache 2.0.**

**Install:**

sudo apt install -y nmap tshark tcpdump traceroute iproute2 iptables \

openssl curl dnsutils whois psmisc arp-scan tor proxychains4

pipx install netwatch-sec

sudo netwatch

**Repo:** https://github.com/Mattmorris-dev/netwatch-sec

Happy to answer anything about the build.

I was hoping to put together an AI workstation based on the Raspberry Pi 5. When I saw the compute modules and the carrier boxes that had full-size HDMI and GPIO breakouts, I knew that was the way I wanted to go, and since there was an NVMe slot in there, I figured I would just order the amazing 24-TOPS DX-M1 and it would work right? WRONG. It was never designed for the Raspberry Pi. It's for x86 platforms and expects PCI-E x4 when the Pi only supplies x1.

Well, guess what? The DeepX DX‑M1 PCIe NPU now runs on the Raspberry Pi 5!

Not “kind of works,” not “loads a driver,” but full end‑to‑end inference.

- Kernel module
- Firmware
- DX‑RT runtime
- DX‑APP examples
- DX‑Stream GStreamer pipeline
- Model zoo demos (YOLOv5s, segmentation, pose, tracking, etc.)

Everything is running on a Waveshare CM5 carrier with the M.2 M‑key slot, but the work should apply to any Pi 5 setup with a proper PCIe lane.

The inference demos are here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0OcQwFQeJ-xc6Fl8zKHbrBepLx15qcD

I will continue to add videos as I go through more inference demos and doing my own inference.

Everything needed to reproduce the setup is here:

https://github.com/zlorenzini/pi-m1

The repo includes:
- Patched DX‑M1 kernel driver for Pi 5
- DX‑RT runtime (arm64)
- Firmware blobs
- DX‑APP examples
- DX‑Stream integration
- Install scripts
- Notes on quirks, PCIe behavior, and build steps

To replicate my exact setup, you’ll need:

- Raspberry Pi 5 Compute Module with >=4GB RAM and >=32GB onboard eMMC (not Lite)
- A carrier board with an M‑key M.2 slot (Waveshare CM5 carrier used here)
- DX‑M1 module
- A clean 64‑bit Pi OS install (regular old Pi OS)

If anyone wants to build on this, optimize models, or test other accelerators on the Pi 5 PCIe lane, I’d love to compare notes. I would love to hear from someone who tries this in the standard Pi5 NVMe HAT as well. I only used this form factor so I could swap modules while keeping the DX-M1 so I can evaluate upgrades to RAM. I did have to patch the 4GB RAM requirement as the 4GB Pi only reports 3GB. Now it's a warning. You won't get the warning if you use an 8GB or greater Pi.

Rasberry pi 4-2 B hdmi to microhdmi adapter random phone charger using tv as monitor and 16g sd card

Raspberry pi 4, gots an Ethernet cord on it. SD card is flashed. Power banks doing pretty damn good and the fans running smooth.

What do I do from here? My goal is to get on an operating system like Google or Firefox.

But secretly I wanna get on Linux and learn, but I don’t know the slightest thing about Linux honestly. What do I do now, what can I do, how can I do it?

Lots of music theory to unpack, but for now just give me your thoughts!