Setting up access to a headless Raspberry Pi is one of those tasks that should take a few minutes, but for some reason always seems to take much longer. The most common method is to configure Wi-Fi access and an SSH service on the Pi before starting it, which can go wrong in many different ways. This author, for example, recently spent a few hours failing to set up a headless Pi on a network secured with Protected EAP, and was eventually driven to using SSH over Bluetooth. This could thankfully soon be a thing of the past, as [Paul Oberosler] developed a package for SSH over USB, which is included in the latest versions of Raspberry Pi OS.

The idea behind rpi-usb-gadget is that a Raspberry Pi in gadget mode can be plugged into a host machine, which recognizes it as a network adapter. The Pi itself is presented as a host on that network, and the host machine can then SSH into it. Additionally, using Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), the Pi can use the host machine’s internet access. Gadget mode can be enabled and configured from the Raspberry Pi Imager. Setting up ICS is less plug-and-play, since an extra driver needs to be installed on Windows machines. Enabling gadget mode only lets the selected USB port work as a power input and USB network port, not as a host port for other peripherals.

Raspberry Pi Imager, a tool that helps users easily write OS images to an SD card for booting a Raspberry Pi, has just released version 2.0.5, now available for download.

On macOS, the update introduces proper dark mode and Liquid Glass icon support using pre-compiled assets. The release also adds an icon compilation script, allowing developers to regenerate icon assets more easily when needed.

Several user interface adjustments land across platforms. The update popup now tracks versions more reliably, resolving issues where update notifications could behave incorrectly. BaseDialog components have been adjusted to enforce a more appropriate minimum height, improving usability on smaller displays.

DIY AI LLMs

Raspberry Pi Imager, a tool that helps users easily write OS images to an SD card for booting a Raspberry Pi, has just released version 2.0.4, now available for download.

A new write progress watchdog actively monitors stalled operations, while additional recovery strategies address problematic async I/O scenarios by dynamically reducing queue depth or falling back to synchronous writes when required. Timeout handling has been standardized across platforms, with a five-minute emergency timeout acting as a final safeguard against unresponsive operations.

Specifically I'm using the OrangePi Zero 2W and the Banana Pi M4 Zero (both are Pi Zero form factor), but I figure if it works in a Raspberry Pi it should work in these. Wondering if they're worth the cost, if they work at all, and/or if it's just asking for trouble.

The project I'm working on requires a good bit of storage. It's essentially an "internet in a box" device that has a portable selection of media (Wikipedia dump, music, TV shows, movies, and books) as well as web-based software to view them (Kiwix, MPD+Snapcast, Jellyfin, Calibre-Web, etc) as well as some other utilities (PiHole for DNS/DHCP/ad blocking, Searx-NG, VPN clients and routing, etc).

The OrangePi is currently the working prototype, and it has a 512 GB SD card and a 512GB USB-connected NVMe. Due to a quirky wifi chip, it requires a separate USB wifi adapter to do hotspot. Because of this, it kind of sprawls and isn't very portable without disassembly.

The Banana Pi has a better wifi chip and can do hotspot internally. So to keep my portable server keychain sized, I'd like to outfit it with either a 1 TB or 1.5 TB SD card for its media store rather than attaching a USB->NVMe enclosure. This one also has eMMC for the system, so it wouldn't be booting from or writing logs, etc to the SD card. Most of the data/media on the SD card would be WORM (write once, read many) but would be updated/refeshed periodically.

Would a large 1 or 1.5 TB SD card (Samsung or Sandisk, depending on price) be a waste of money or be a cause of issues?

Before the Raspberry Pi came out, one cheap and easy way to get GPIO on a computer with a real operating system was to manipulate the pins on an old parallel port, then most commonly used for printers. Luckily, as that port became obsolete we got the Raspberry Pi, which has the GPIO and a number of other advantages over huge desktop computers from the 90s and 00s as well. But if you really miss that form factor or as yearn for the days of the old parallel port, this build which puts a Raspberry Pi into a mini ITX desktop case is just the thing for you.

There are a few features that make this build more than just a curiosity. The most obvious is that the Pi actually has support for PCIe and includes a single PCIe x1 slot which could be used for anything from a powerful networking card to an NVMe to a GPU for parallel computing in largely the same way that any desktop computer might them. The Pi Compute Module 5 that this motherboard is designed for doesn’t provide power to the PCIe slots automatically though, but the power supply that can be installed in the case should provide power not only to the CM5 but to any peripherals or expansion cards, PCIe or otherwise, that you could think of to put in this machine.

Public safety rules should be dull in the best possible way. Clear. Predictable. Written by people who understand what actually causes harm in a crowd of thousands. New York City usually gets this right. It has decades of muscle memory for doing hard things in public, under pressure, without panicking. Which is why the prohibited items list for the January 1, 2026 NYC mayoral inauguration block party seemed… off

If you do, then you're in luck, thanks to the Suptronics X1013 expansion board for the Raspberry Pi 5, which adds ten USB ports for a total of fourteen

Raspberry Pi Imager, a tool that helps users easily write OS images to an SD card for booting a Raspberry Pi, has just released version 2.0.3, now available for download.

A major highlight is enhanced performance visibility during image writing. Raspberry Pi Imager can now detect bottlenecks in real time and clearly indicate whether operations are limited by network speed, decompression, or storage writes.

A detailed timing breakdown has also been added, making it easier to analyze throughput and diagnose slow flashes. When direct I/O is enabled, periodic sync operations are skipped to improve write performance, while async I/O support has been expanded and refined across platforms.

I discovered that the Raspberry Pi doesn’t boot the same way traditional PC’s do. This was interesting and I thought I’d share.

At a high level, Raspberry Pi booting is firmware-driven, not BIOS-driven like a PC. On Raspberry Pi, the GPU (VideoCore) is powered first and is the root of trust for booting. The ARM CPU is not the initial execution environment. This is a deliberate architectural choice dating back to the original Pi.

...

This explains several Raspberry Pi oddities:

• The Raspberry Pi has No BIOS / UEFI
• The config.txt is not a Linux File
• Kernel Replacement Is Trivial
• Boot failures before Linux is loaded are invisible to Linux

... Why? The Raspberry Pi uses Broadcom BCM2xxx chips where The “main” processor is a VideoCore IV/VI GPU is activated at power-on. It runs proprietary firmware that handles the boot. The BCM2xxx chips are typically used in set-top boxes for video streaming/entertainment. For these types of devices, the goal is to quickly get to a flashy user interface. The Raspberry Pi Foundation chose these inexpensive chips as their base that leave them with an odd boot order.

Just found this interesting that the GPU boots before the CPU and is responsible for the low level boot process. Feels especially odd to me because the GPU is something I basically ignore in all of my Pi projects.

Check out this self hostable social media platform. Now compatible to run on a raspberry pi.

Pi 4 came out with power requirements of 5V@3A. In reality, using a 3rd party power supply will result in a low voltage warning even if the power supply can provide 3A. The reason lies in voltage drop. Pi 4 board sends a warning if voltage drops below a certain value (about 4.75V based on my measurements).

I’ve done measurements with a 100W laptop charger which is rated for 3A at 5V. Under load, voltage drops from 4.95V to 4.75V, which triggers the low voltage warning. That’s why the official 15W power supply is rated for 5.1V@3A, 0.1V higher than the USB specification. With Pi 4 you can just ignore the warnings, as even an overclocked board with 2 external HDDs fits into 15W.

With Pi 5 the situation turns around. An overclocked board alone draws 2.5 amps, leaving no space for USB devices. The new official power supply is now rated for 5.1V@5A, which you can’t replace with a charger from your junk box full of spaghetti cables and random chargers. So why not just buy an official RPi power supply? Even if it’s priced reasonably, I don’t like the idea of saving $2 on a PD chip and then spending $12 on a power supply and being tied to that specific power supply and that specific cable length.

So I checked my junk box and found a PD trigger board, an XL4015 DC-DC converter, and some wiring. I set the output voltage to 5.15V and soldered wires to the GPIO adapter that was bundled with the NVMe HAT. I used 2 pins for 5V and 2 pins for GND, as single pin couldn't handle 5 amps.

So now Pi has a Power Delivery–compatible power system (actually it works with almost any quick-charge protocol). This means it can be powered from basically any fast charger. The PD trigger board asks the power supply for 20V (or the highest voltage it supports if 20V isn’t available), then this voltage is converted down to 5.15V using the XL4015 module. The Pi itself is powered through the GPIO pins, bypassing the USB-C input entirely.

As a result: no warnings, one additional USB port, and additional voltage to power other accessories (e.g. 12V fan, monitors, 3.5" drives—you name it), all using a single Type-C cable.

I've found that my Pi 400's built in web browser is almost unusable with bloaty script-heavy sites, so I'm wondering if the Pi 5 or 500+ is any better. There would be an NVMe SSD present if that helps.

If someone has this setup, could they take a look at homedepot.com ? That's a very slow and obnoxious site that I use sometimes, as I do buy some from there when I can't avoid it. I'm ok if it's a bit sluggish but my Pi 400 was near incapable of navitation or loading the page in a reasonable amount of waiting.

Thanks!

Raspberry Pi’s Tom Dewey released today the first update to the major Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0 series of this cross-platform utility for installing Raspberry Pi OS and other operating systems to a microSD card.

You would think that Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.2 is a small update that fixes some bugs and other issues discovered in the initial Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0 release, but, in fact, it’s a huge release adding lots of new features like direct I/O bypass to reduce memory pressure during writes.

This release also adds a zero-copy ring buffer for data transfer between download and write threads to reduce CPU overhead, an asynchronous cache file writer to overlap download and disk I/O operations, sequential read hints during verification for better prefetching, and a performance data analysis tool for debugging slow writes.

Less than two weeks after the November release, Raspberry Pi OS received its December update with a collection of usability improvements, desktop refinements, and important stability fixes.

The release introduces a safe-eject mechanism for USB-connected HDD and NVMe drives, allowing users to remove external storage without risking data corruption. The Labwc desktop also gains a new Alt-F2 shortcut for opening the run dialog, extending its keyboard-driven workflow.

Moreover, the update adjusts how the Screens control panel behaves by no longer generating a default kanshi configuration file on launch, ensuring that existing user configurations are not unintentionally overwritten.

"The current pressure on memory prices, driven by competition from the AI infrastructure roll-out, is painful but ultimately temporary," CEO Eben Upton wrote in a blog post. He also said that the company looks forward to "unwinding these price increases once it abates."

Raspberry Pi announced today a new variant of the latest Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer with 1GB RAM to provide the community with more flexibility for their Linux and Open Source projects.

Released two years ago, the Raspberry Pi 5 was initially launched in 4GB and 8GB RAM variants, with a 2GB RAM variant released in August 2024, and a 16GB RAM model arriving in January 2025 thanks to the optimized D0 stepping of the Broadcom BCM2712 application processor in the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer.

As of today, you can buy the Raspberry Pi 5 with 1GB RAM. Apart from the 1GB RAM, the new Raspberry Pi 5 features the same specs as the rest of the Raspberry Pi 5 variants, including a quad-core 2.4GHz Arm Cortex-A76 processor with cryptography extensions, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and a PCI Express port.

cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/38253307