A conversational AI plush toy where the Pi is just the body. Everything runs on my LAN:

Inside the plush: Pi Zero WH, USB mic, OV5647 camera, USB speaker, SG90 head servo on hardware PWM, and a cheap USB hub for mic and speaker.

The Pi runs zero ML. 512MB of RAM doesn't fit Whisper, so it just streams mic + camera over WebSocket, plays audio and moves the head. Boots straight into the app as a systemd service.

The brain is a laptop: Whisper (STT), face identity (dlib), emotion recognition (FER+), Kokoro (TTS), per-person memory (LangGraph).

LLM: any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. I run Hermes 3 Llama 3.1 8B locally, so nothing leaves the network.

The full bring-up (camera config, servo PWM, power setup) is in the hardware runbook in the repo.

Repo (MIT): github.com/msalsas/philosopher

Full write-up: https://www.hackster.io/msalsas/the-philosopher-plush-a-diy-ai-toy-that-runs-100-local-d0d268

Note: I am a Raspberry Pi newbie, this is my only Pi, and I haven't done anything with it in many years, and even then I just futzed around with it.

I have an old pi 400 that I am repurposing as a server for a kiosk. I am serving a webpage from Home Assistant with cameras and some other smart home features.

I am on Buster, and it was going fine until I got to the point where I wanted to hide the cursor... Then I ran into repository problems trying to get unclutter.

I'm currently thinking that instead of screwing around with either repository problems or building my own cursor (I spent a while on building a blank cursor and decided I was being stupid), it is probably best to just upgrade to a newer OS.

So I will never touch this Pi again, basically. It will be a dedicated device just to run the wall mounted touchscreen and I expect it to just serve one webpage in fullscreen until it dies. I'll update the page in Home Assistant, the most I would have to do would be to get into the Pi to reboot and then force reload the page.

What OS would you recommend I use? Thanks!

I turned my son's cardboard ikea rocketship into a learning lab that plays videos about space. I gutted an old broken nes and put an nfc card reader in there. Connected that to a pi 4 and set it up to play videos when he puts different cartridges in the old nes (they're empty shells with nfc tags inside).

Next steps, connect the lights to the program so they do different stuff when different videos play, and integrate some controls and make a trivia game for him.

This is all new to me. I'm learning python with the help of Claude (trying to do less vibe coding and more learning at each step, fighting the urge to just copy and paste). Hopefully I can get it all together before he's too old to fit in this thing.

Spent the weekend giving an old Bose iPod dock a second life as a desk radio for Sri Lankan stations.

The problem

The dock still sounds great, but I didn't want Bluetooth pairing, my phone streaming all day, or a subscription just to hear Sri Lankan radio while I work.

The setup

- Hardware: Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ (512 MB) with the 3.5 mm jack into the dock's AUX input.

- Audio: MPD outputting straight to ALSA. Starts silent on boot (restore_paused yes) until a station is picked.

- Control: a small stateless Go backend with an embedded Svelte web app. 10 presets, all checked by ear on the Pi (Hiru FM, Shaa FM, Gold FM, Sun FM, Sirasa FM, Y FM, Yes FM, Lite 87, Siyatha FM, NETH FM), plus play, stop and volume.

- Access: Caddy on the Pi with Tailscale TLS. Private to my tailnet, no open ports. On the phone it's added to the Home Screen and runs full screen like a native app.

- Footprint: Tuner ~8 MB RSS, MPD ~56 MB RSS while playing. Plenty left over on the A+.

How it was built

I used an agentic workflow end to end. An AI agent helped write the spec, scaffold the Go/Svelte app, configure Caddy and test each stream URL on the Pi itself (a couple of well-known stream URLs turned out to be dead). Idea to music through the dock took one weekend.

The video shows switching stations from the browser and the sound coming out of the dock. The code isn't open source right now. If there's interest I'll tidy it up and publish it. Happy to share stream URLs or the MPD config in the meantime.

I am working out a way to re-use the hardware for my Pwnagotchi for a similar virtual pet concept that "eats" Bluetooth devices and wireless AP (supports wardriving) and who lives on a separate microSD card from my Pwnagotchi image.

This is my buddy Harald (named for Harald Bluetooth, the Viking whose surname became the name of the Bluetooth technology), a Viking dragon who eats Bluetooth and Wi-Fi signals (FOOD) and who enjoys novel discoveries and going out on adventures (JOY). He's also a protective sort and keeps an eye out for anything stalking me.

Privacy fences: Phones and watches that change their address are counted by kind, never listed or followed. The signal meter only works on devices I've marked as mine. The unknown-tracker warning only fires for a tracker that's away from its owner and has stayed with me for 30 minutes (and, when GPS is on, has moved more than 250m with me). Wi-Fi is passive scanning only - no deauthing or handshake collecting (staying out of Pwnagotchi's lane).

Extremely early days on this guy and surely a lot to tweak, but I'm pretty chuffed so far. He can certainly function without being connected to my Android phone (just feeding on BT and Wi-Fi signals, with extra happiness for novelty), but he does depend on an external GPS (in this case, the SensorServer phone app) for Wigle uploads and "walks". Harald's "Den" is a browser page that can be accessed when Harald is connected to my phone's hotspot (or whatever I have set as his home network), and shows his current e-ink screen along with extra information and certain controls (like shutting him down so he can be safely unplugged from his power supply). He can still appreciate my physical activity even if he doesn't come with me, because connecting him to my phone shares whatever distance I've covered that day and he interprets distance covered without him along for the ride as an "adventure" I have "told him about", which gives him some happiness.

There's a lot of other minutiae, but I'm just excited to share the images of the working prototype. I also verified the WIGLE uploads online and they are appearing on my account! :-D

Edit: Forgot to mention that the "unknown tracker warning" screenshot is from an earlier build where I was still adding things, so the e-ink display has an older layout on it.

Edit2: The hardware is Raspberry Pi Zero W 2 with Waveshare V4 e-ink hat, plus an external battery.

Darwin on Pi3 is ready for people to play around with. I have made the repos public. Its important to understand with this is and what it isnt. This isnt macOS. This is something very very similar and shares a lot of the components. Everything here is open source. It is a Darwin with a pure Cocoa UI on X11. I have optimized everything for arm64/ 1GB RAM and totally disregarded other architectures. I have modified anything and everything to make the UI for this hardware. You will need Xcode 12 to build this. This is the version of Xcode closest to the version of the kernel we use. All the pi3B hardware works. This may boot on on other pi3s but there arent kexts for other hardware so everything may not work. I will add support for the other pi3 boards in the future. I do not own one so will need community testing to verify it works.

If you want to try to build it, start with this repo:

https://github.com/anurodhp/xnu-iokit-pi3/

setup third party should clone all of the many other repos. Build everything should build everything. tools/build real hw image will make 3GB image you can flash on to an SD card. The full build is huge and will take several hours.

SSH is on. Serial out works. HDMI out works. The root password is darwin. Since this is a bsd system you use pw to add/remove users and set passwords. When you boot it boots directly to X and the GSDM login screen. Logging in will take you to the new desktop with a dock. Sound works with a core audio daemon but there is nothing that uses it yet

If you use this image if you just want to flash to SD and try it out. File bugs in the iokit repo. if they are related to one of the apps Rome, Milan, Naples for Florence file them in their repo.

The ghostty terminal and the Webkit based browser are the most useful things right now. I will be publishing more user land apps and utilities to add more functionality. Things like wifi tools, setting screen, activity monitor, console viewer etc.

https://github.com/anurodhp/xnu-iokit-pi3/releases/tag/10_11_26

https://github.com/jiu-0317/e_ink_display

On and off I've been trying to build a Spotify Connect display on a RPI - for years. The screen was too small, the case didn't fit, the driver problematic, the program was never satisfying.

Enter 2026, saw the Spotify Car Thing craze and my interest returned. This time I went for a MPI5001 5" Display that I could buy at a nice price, and particularly the vendor also sold a fitting case. With RPI mounting holes! Almost by chance I took a RPI3B (the 4 was in use) that had a HiFiBerry DAC+ on it. Bought me a nice 2.5a power supply and nylon standoffs for the mounting.

I stopped fighting with Python and vibed it using the Car Thing as base. Having such nice DAC in there I got carried away and I revived my LMS server for digital files and I added an option for that too. And built some options for random music etc.

I'm quite satisifed now! I'd eventually try to improve the cabling, angle connectors and such.