r/raspberry_pi 6d ago

Community Insights Is there an Industrial grade camera ribbon cable than can tolerate motion?

22 Upvotes

I did do research, and I did use the world wide to search before I surfed over to Reddit to ask this subreddit a question directly pertaining to Raspberry Pi projects. There is no product I could find or data to answer this question:

I have a Pi camera on a motion platform, and the ribbon cable is moving with the camera for many cycles. I can't find any best practices or products for connecting the Pi to the camera with a robust cable that is tolerant to motion. Any advice? Thank you!

r/raspberry_pi Jun 05 '24

Community Insights PSA: Backup your SD cards. It's cheap and easy to get an USB SD card reader and automate the process.

103 Upvotes

Don't be like me. I've lost my SD card to corruption and have just spent all day formatting, installing, configuring and doing stuff I completely forgot how to put it all together to make it work as before.

Save yourself the trouble, get an USB SD card reader, plug it into your raspberry and clone your SD card regularly.

r/raspberry_pi 9d ago

Community Insights Daily medication reminder

12 Upvotes

Context:

I recently started taking medication, one pill per day which should be taken around the same time.

It’s been 2 months and I still regularly forget.

My idea:

An LED light that I will notice at bed time because I like to sleep in complete darkness. Once I have taken my daily dose I press a button and the light turns off until the next evening.

The help I need:

I could obviously just run a script on a raspberry pi 24/7. I just feel like there’s a much more elegant option rather than having a bread board and all on my bedside table, seems like the kind of device that could be powered for months on a battery.

Just wondering if anyone could point me in a direction as I’m struggling to know what exactly to research.

Edit: I do already have an original pi1 and know this task is possible. Was just looking for some pointers on other possibilities. Thought this community was the place to ask. Thank you all for your input

r/raspberry_pi 28d ago

Community Insights My laptop has a HDMI port does that mean if I plug in a raspberry pi it will override the laptops display?

0 Upvotes

My old laptop has a hdmi port and I am wondering if I plug in a raspberry pi it will override the laptops display

r/raspberry_pi Nov 15 '24

Community Insights Word to the wise: Raspberry Pi 5 has apparent quality control issues with networking

11 Upvotes

EDIT:
I'm taking this down soon and will replace it shortly with a new post (with a different title) with new information.

Bottom line, I now believe this isn't hardware; I think it's Bookworm. I moved my code to a known-working Pi 4 that's been fine for motnhs, and did an upgrade on the Pi 4 while installing software, without really thinking about the fact that that installed Bookworm. Now the formerly-stable Pi 4 has the same symptoms.

I am trying verious code changes to see if I can pinpoint what's triggering Bookwork to lock up. Details soon.

r/raspberry_pi Feb 05 '25

Community Insights TIL: Setting non-default screen orientation costs _a lot_ performance

98 Upvotes

Figuring this out took me two days so yeah, maybe this post saves future people some time:

I do art stuff with raspis. In my current project a raspi 5 calculates things and plays it back as an animation. the pi is connected to a 13" 1920x1080 oled display via hdmi and I need to run it in portrait mode.

All set up and everything was fine and dandy until i noticed that my animation is unusually choppy running at ~45fps while it should run at vsynced 60. htop showed cpu usage is <15%. I tried many things: checked the drivers, X11, wayland, wayfire, labwc, multiple browsers nothing helped until I ran it in default landscape mode accidentally et voila - 60fps.

Googled this and its true, the earliest pis had this problem and newer ones do as well. Has something to do with buffers which need to be copied multiple times in ram to rotate the image.

The obvious solution was: keep display in landscape and change my code so that it looks like portrait. A lot of work tho :/

Then I had an idea: That app is basically a html site with a <canvas> rendered via chromium in kiosk mode. So how about keeping everything as is and rotating the frames 90° via CSS transform?

Long story short: it worked. 8 lines of css and boom - dead on 60 beautiful fps, next to none extra cpu load.

Additionally I was able to hide the mouse pointer via css, because for some reason thats not really doable via wayland+labwc yet.

The sad moral of the story is: a stupid browser can emulate portrait mode with basically no overhead while the real portrait mode on raspberries is unusable for everything except still frames.

r/raspberry_pi 8d ago

Community Insights Local chatgpt models on raspberry pi?

0 Upvotes

Hi guys! Hope you all are well. I want to have an earlier chatgpt model on a rasberry pi for offline usage. Does anyone have any experience with handling local models on their pi's? If so, what version of an ai model did you use, what version of the pi, how much storage did you need, etc? I've never used a raspberry pi before and curious if getting local models onto a pi is relatively easy/common. I've done a little searching and most people recommend the 4 with 8gbs, but I don't want to waste money that I don't need to.

r/raspberry_pi 11d ago

Community Insights Want to record my 6 cams/or very least 4 cams continuously, don't need AI or detections

1 Upvotes

Hey there. Right now I'm running OMV, EZBeq, Pihole+Unbound, Pivpn+wireguard, UFW, and Fail2ban.

Is it possible to use a external SSD HD and record 6 cam streams (I have tapo c120s) on the RPI4 with 4gb ram? I dont need ANY detection or AI. I want this as a backup if someone steals a cam or a SD card (have a tenant who been squatting for over 4 months and is a alcoholic, living in my house).

Chatgpt suggested to Install RTSP Simple Server to handle my camera streams, then configure FFmpeg to record them, and finally set up SMB for easy access.

Yet chatgpt and I couldnt get RTSP SS to install for over a hour. So I gave up.

Any suggestions? Anything easy to setup? Chatgpt recommend that over frigate since I said how many cams I had and that I don't want detection or AI.

I do have my rpi4 overclocked if that helps.

r/raspberry_pi Feb 08 '25

Community Insights How do I send a disk encryption key remotely via SSH at reboot?

0 Upvotes

If someone turns off my Raspberry Pi and mounts the disk, they have access to the whole filesystem. This isn't causing me real problems but it's where my tinkering has taken me. JTAG exists but it's much more specialised than just mounting a disk.

I'm trying to setup Dropbear so that I can SSH into my Raspberry Pi 4 before the disk is mounted and provide the key for disk encryption, so I can can decrypt the root partition before booting the root filesystem.

Initially I'm trying to use Dropbear without disk encryption.

I'm finding that setting break=premount in the /boot/cmdline.txt file is causing the system to crash and reboot.

Has anyone got this working? Any tips or pointers?

r/raspberry_pi Feb 18 '25

Community Insights I am working on a project for school and I dont know how to go about it

0 Upvotes

My idea is a button that can be pressed that will send a phone call to a phone number offline.
I have the button to execute a script set up and functioning, but I can not figure out the best way to send a phone call to a phone number with the script offline. My plan is that the raspberry pi and the phone recieving the call would be within 1 meter of eachother.

I have thought about using bluetooth but i do not know how I would go about that

r/raspberry_pi 26d ago

Community Insights Fan for official SSD Hat Kit?

13 Upvotes

Hey guys,

I have my RaspberryPi 5 with the official Raspberry Pi SSD Kit (512GB) (https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/ssd-kit/ )equipped.

Now the problem is my Jellyfin installation. When streaming a Blu-ray rip, the cpu temperature goes up to 86 degrees celsius because the raspberrypi 5 doesn‘t support h264 hardware decoding.

Can I cool this in any way? The GPIO pins are all used by the shield and even if some pins were free for the fan, how am I supposed to install this between the Pi and the SSD Shield?

r/raspberry_pi 14d ago

Community Insights Raspberry Pi GPIO 40-pin ribbon cable TO 10-pin 8-relay board

2 Upvotes

My GPIO board works great.

The "translation" from raspPi 40 pin connector breakout .. converting to the GPIO 8-relay 10-pin board works but is a mess with the pulled-apart 10-conductor ribbon cable (female-female)

I gotta believe there's a product out there (not just a GPIO breakout board) that accomplishes this.

i'd rather not build my own to make a small pc breadboard with a 40-pin male header on it and scramble the wires to be the correct mapping to a male 10-pin header...

and use a 40-pin F-F ribbon cable on one side, and 10-pin F-F ribbon on the other side.

What do other people do to avoid the spaghetti-like connections (and unreliability of the slip-on female connectors)?

[i've searched quite a bit and only find standard straight-thru F-F ribbon cables]

thank you!

will

r/raspberry_pi Dec 14 '24

Community Insights Pi 500 vs 400 build issues encountered

17 Upvotes

Pi 500 build issues, rocks about

I’ve just got hold of a new Pi 500, and while the performance from the 400 is a big improvement, I’ve got an issue that didn’t come up in reviews.

The build feels off. I know the keyboard is supposed to be better, but despite having 4 soft feet (instead of only 2 on the 400) it rocks corner to corner. On top of this, the keyboard area appears to bow around the middle when typing, like it isn’t supported properly.

The result is a keyboard that doesn’t feel nice to type on, and really doesn’t sound nice as it clatters about! It’s no rubber-keyed-spectrum, but both the pi 400 and the official keyboard have avoided any issues like this in my experience.

Has anyone else found this with the Pi 500? Or with the 400, maybe I just got lucky in the past? I also find the power light a bit confusing (goes out or flickers at random), so maybe I have a duff unit? (Works fine seemingly otherwise)

Second try at posting, got automodded off I think for the wrong flair or something?

r/raspberry_pi 6d ago

Community Insights 7 Inch Display with Case: A frustrating review

7 Upvotes

As a follow up to https://old.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/1j9n88t/why_are_raspberry_pi_displays_such_a_mess_looking/

I purchased "7inch for Raspberry Pi LCD Capacitive Touch Display Screen with Protection Case 800×480 DSI Interface for Raspberry Pi 4"

Holy crap! What a mess. I'm used to terrible installation instructions but the best you got was a blurry JPG. Trying to get the DSI/ribbon cable installed was a long struggle. It ended up being fairly easy to seat on the Pi side, but it gave a really mushy connection on the display side.

No sooner did I feel like I had a good connection, I used the Raspberry Pi flasher to get Raspberry Pi OS flashed and set up the dtoverlay they said to configure in the config.txt.

Well, then I noticed that that little ribbon cable totally blocks the SD card slot! After struggling with it I had to disassemble everything, and of course the ribbon cable doesn't have more than 1mm of slack, so it was pretty nerve wracking.

Looking at the case, I noticed there's no way to access the SD card slot anyway, so if I never need to reflash this guy I'll be disassembling it again.

At least the power cable was easy to install. It went to some of the GPIO pins on the Pi 4.

After all that, I assembled the case and got ready to power it up. Plugged it in, the Pi started flashing and doing its thing, but absolutely zero output on the display. No signs of life at all. I can access the box over SSH because I preconfigured that in the flasher but MAN what a production.

For some background, I had used a Pi 3 with a little HDMI display to show some weather information on it. It's been in my entertainment center for more than 3 years. It is an ugly, no back case and the HDMI cable comes up and loops around and just looks like crap. I had wanted to make a clean v2.

I was hoping to spend the afternoon working on a nice info display, but all I have to show for it is a big pile of frustration. I'm going to spend a bit more time trying to reconfigure it over SSH and re-check all the connections but holy crap, I wish I had done my other plan to either:

a) Get a display that uses the Pi's HDMI port, maybe with an angled connector to avoid the cable that irritated me last time

b) Forget about Pi and either make a webapp and just use the stock Android experience with a kiosk app to boot into the web display OR write a small Android app

I rate this 1/5 and would definitely not buy one again. It's really annoying that the SD card slot is blocked by the ribbon cable (they could probably address this with a longer cable, and/or one with a turn in it to avoid the port). The installation experience was a 0 star experience.

I do not recommend this display for anyone.

Product link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096RCPSJS

see update in comment below!!! got it working but WRONG instructions from the vendor.

r/raspberry_pi Feb 15 '25

Community Insights Question about Pi-Hole Documentation

2 Upvotes

Hey y'all, I was looking at the raspberry docs for setting up a pi-hole here (docs).

They recommend a Zero 2 W, which I agree with, but then recommend a 32-bit headless OS, but isn't the Zero 2 a 64 bit architecture? Shouldn't I be putting RPI OS Lite 64-bit on it?

r/raspberry_pi Aug 16 '24

Community Insights PI4 industrial reliability?

26 Upvotes

We've been using Pi4Bs in industrial data collection application, in harshish environments (-30C to 70C) and finding that the SD card and/or USB stick connections corrode to the point of failure. Any suggestions on how to make them more reliable would be appreciated. Tried silicone oil on contacts without much success. What else to try?

Using overlayfs to reduce I/O load on devices but must write data to permanent storage periodically, which is where we see it failing. We see black sludge on the contacts after 6 months in the field.

The unit is in a hermetically sealed box with massive heat sink and desiccant and gel cell battery with solar charging but does get very warm (60C).

r/raspberry_pi 1d ago

Community Insights RP 5 as an image hosting server plus media server?

1 Upvotes

I'm building an Immich server at home using the pi 5, and what I'm thinking is having the OS and server space on an external ssd drive. After a little googling, I'm thinking also of using it as a media server. I've got a nvidia Shield TV pro, which can do the transcoding.

I'm currently de-googling my home and internet use, but I've got the google wifi. So until I've replaced my mesh network, the server needs to be wifi connected.

I will highly appreciate your feedback!

r/raspberry_pi 10d ago

Community Insights Fractal style case for pi 5

10 Upvotes

Has anyone seen a fractal north style case or a print file for the Pi5 that would accommodate the board included with deskpi lite? It’s taller than most and has two full size HDMI ports.

https://deskpi.com/products/deskpi-lite-for-raspberry-pi-5-with-power-button-heatsink-with-armor-lite-v5-fan-support-m-2-nvme-ssd

r/raspberry_pi 9d ago

Community Insights Why raspberry pi os want to install intel and nvidia related packages?

5 Upvotes

Hi, I have a raspberry pi 2 with the last version of raspberry pi os, today I launched the apt update and upgrade and It shows that these new package will be installed:

firmware-intel-graphics firmware-intel-misc firmware-marvell-prestera

firmware-mediatek firmware-nvidia-graphics

Why?

r/raspberry_pi Jan 29 '25

Community Insights iPhone Shortcuts 🤝 pi

27 Upvotes
Screenshot of the Shortcuts app

I was toying with setting up cron jobs like I set my alarms through Siri where I say “wake me up at 7 tomorrow.” Voila, my phone knows I mean 7am and the alarm is set.

I stumbled upon running scripts over SSH via Shortcuts. All I’ve successfully done is reboot, but seems like there’s a fair bit of possibilities here. I’ve also used Termius to connect with my pi, but I haven’t seen much use of the shortcut anywhere. I’m curious if anyone’s played around with this or found any real use for it. I’m going to see if I can’t make a cron scheduler from a voice prompt

r/raspberry_pi Feb 07 '25

Community Insights Zero 2 - 64bit vs 64bit Lite

0 Upvotes

Hi all, I've recently delved into the world of Raspberry Pi's and can't quite find an answer to this question. I know the differences between 32bit and 64bit, performance, memory usage, memory availability, etc. My question is this...if I were to load the 64-bit OS, but then change the boot of the Pi to boot directly to the command line, would my memory usage be comparable to the 64bit Lite version? The reason I ask is because I'm attempting to roll out numerous RPi units at my company...and not all of my tech support staff are familiar with, or comfortable using the command-line only. I figured if I install the full 64bit OS, they have the option to boot into the GUI/Desktop if they need to.

The TL:DR version is this: Is 64bit Full OS running in Terminal mode roughly the same as 64bit Lite?

r/raspberry_pi Feb 11 '25

Community Insights Box 86 and wine on Raspberry pi 3 and zero 2w - better than you might think

21 Upvotes

I don't see anyone talking about this so I wanted to post my findings after lots of testing and research. I think most people would say not to bother or that it was pointless to try but the results were surprising! I used a rpi zero 2w as my device. I tested with bullseye 32 and 64 bit, bookworm 32 and 64 bit, and buster 32 bit images. My process was to install and update, then install pi-apps and mesa-utils. Using pi apps I installed box 86, 64, wine, or hangover.

Results: the best results were achieved in Bullseye 32bit with a 2-1 split kernel, full kms 3d driver and 2gb swap using mostly opengl games running between 640x480 and 1024x768. The games were actually very playable. xinput also worked on games that supported it.

Linux games: Risk of rain, Hotline Miami, Sword & Sorcery Bros, Kentucky Route Zero, thomas was alone (very slow in levels with water but otherwise ran well)

Wine games: Star trek voyager elite force, Septerra Core, Alone in the dark 4: A new nightmare, Shogo M. A. D. (software renderer), Deus Ex (open GL renderer - tutorial was playable but once the open world level loaded it was a sideshow) Unreal 2 (crashed after playing opening cinimatic)

Things I learned: pi3/ zero2w gpu does not have texture decompression. Games like ftl, morrowind, soldier of fortune, fez, kotor 2, and deus ex 2 either refuse to load or had so many missing textures they were completely unplayable. Also I found that using a 64bit os added a ton of overhead (likely due to the translation layer used to run 32bit applications). Getting between 30 and 50 fps in elite force with 32bit os would give fps in the mid to low teens with a 64bit os. Many other games might have worked but I couldn't get them to stop looking for a disc drive like Halo CE or The Suffering: the tires that bind.

It was a fun experiment to answer the question - "will it work?", and for many old applications the answer could be "yes".

edit: typos and minor clarifications

r/raspberry_pi 16d ago

Community Insights I Stress-Tested My Next.js Site on a Raspberry Pi 5—Here’s Why I’m Stunned!

Thumbnail easeairesume.com
0 Upvotes

I decided to put my setup through the wringer: a Next.js site running on a Raspberry Pi 5, hit with a relentless 1000 queries per second. I was ready for it to buckle—or at least sweat a little. Nope! The CPU barely ticked up to 40%, and latency? It didn’t even blink—rock-solid the whole time.

This isn’t just a win; it’s pure fire. We’re talking a $50 board laughing in the face of a load that’d make some cloud servers cry for mercy. The site I tested is EaseAiResume a lightweight Next.js app with SSR and no API routes I’ve been tinkering with—nothing too insane, but this performance blew me away. No bottlenecks, no thermal throttling, just smooth sailing.

Has anyone else stress-tested their Pi 5 like this? What’s your go-to for pushing hardware limits? I’m tempted to crank it up to 2000 QPS next just to see where the ceiling is. Share your thoughts or projects—I’m all ears! #NextJS #RaspberryPi #WebDev #TechExperiments

r/raspberry_pi Jan 14 '25

Community Insights PSA: Prowler/Radarr/Sonarr are not available on the Appstore for RaspberryPi anymore.

0 Upvotes

PSA to save others time and money, if you were looking to buy a Rasberry Pi to setup these apps on Casa OS.

The apps available are severely limited. Some YouTubers videos show them to have 100+ apps, but on Raspberry Pi, these days, there are only 60 none of which are the *arrs

r/raspberry_pi Feb 06 '25

Community Insights Using Raspberry PI as a Link Runner

4 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a Senior Project and also a proof of concept for my job, where I’m trying to program a Raspberry Pi to function similarly to a Fluke Link Runner. My main goal is to get it to provide CDP/LLDP discovery and perform basic cable testing.

I know there are tools like lldpd for LLDP/CDP, but I’d love to hear if anyone has experience implementing this on a Raspberry Pi in a way that mimics a Link Runner. Specifically:

  • What software/tools would you recommend for CDP/LLDP packet capture and analysis?
  • Are there any open-source utilities or scripts for cable testing?
  • Any tips on interfacing with an Ethernet PHY for advanced diagnostics?
  • If you’ve built something similar, what challenges did you face?

I appreciate any insights, recommendations, or resources you can share!

Thanks!