Extreme Raspberry Pi: projects taking Raspberry Pi to its very limits

Raspberry Pi is a very powerful, very small, very customisable device, and we have seen it be used for so many things over the years because of this. Whether folks are slipping them into 3D-printed classic console cases or simply hiding them away as home file servers, we’ve covered many of the cool things the community has done with Raspberry Pi.

Which begs the question — how can you push the limits with a Raspberry Pi? Well, with 13 years of projects and Raspberry Pi models, you’ll be surprised just how far/fast/high/deep Raspberry Pi has gone. We’re taking Raspberry Pi to the extreme.

Longest-running Raspberry Pi

2331 days of uptime for the Model B that could

“This Raspberry Pi has been running for ten years,” says Reddit user KerazyPete, although not without a few reboots. At the time of posting in late 2023, his Raspberry Pi 1 Model B (revision 0002 with 256MB of RAM no less, one of the first production versions) had been ‘up’ for 2331 consecutive days — since July 2017.

The system in question; the original Raspberry Pi 1 design is quite nostalgic

It’s the longest uptime we’ve seen for a Raspberry Pi — in fact, it’s pretty impressive given the occasional power cut, power surge, or accidental unplug. Our file servers and media centres have undergone hardware upgrades as well.

You can easily check how long your Raspberry Pi has been running by opening a terminal and typing uprecords — maybe you’ll be surprised. We do recommend upgrading the operating system on your Raspberry Pi whenever a new OS gets released, though; the security updates can be very important.

Highest Raspberry Pi

GASPACS 428 km over the Earth

Is it cheating to go to space so your Raspberry Pi can claim the computer’s altitude record? Not when there are several Raspberry Pis in space! The current highest Raspberry Pis in space are the Astro Pi boxes up on the International Space Station. However, GASPACS beat their record by a mere six kilometres on its 117-day mission in 2022.

A successful mission photo

The GASPACS (Get Away Special Passive Attitude Control Satellite) was a 1U CubeSat built by students at Utah State University to test aerobraking with an inflatable ‘AeroBoom’. Since the Earth is not a perfect sphere, the CubeSat’s orbital altitude was 416 km (258 miles) at its perigee and 428 km (267 miles) at its apogee.

During the dawn of Raspberry Pi, and for many years afterwards, high-altitude balloonist Dave Akerman would regularly send balloons about 40 km into the mesophere (which is above the stratosphere, Queen fans) with a Raspberry Pi attached to take photos and do other telemetry. In 2016, he broke the world record for the highest live image sent down from an amateur balloon (below), at 41,837 metres. That probably makes it the highest a Raspberry Pi has gone without the use of a rocket.

Fastest Raspberry Pi

AstroPi — 17,100 mph is easier with no friction

While the Astro Pi units on the ISS don’t hold the altitude record for a Raspberry Pi, due to the peculiarities of orbital physics, they are the fastest. Very basically, having a lower orbit means you need to go faster so that you don’t fall to Earth.

The ISS is clocked at 17,100 mph (27,520 km/h) — that’s 4.77 miles per second (7.67 km/s), and 22.5 times the speed of sound at ground level. Those numbers are difficult to conceptualise, but it orbits the Earth in just shy of 93 minutes, meaning it orbits 15.5 times a day. Pretty quick!

The first pair of Astro Pi went up for Tim Peake’s mission

The Astro Pi units in orbit have various sensors thanks to the Sense HAT, including motion sensors, which schoolchildren use to run experiments via code. Unlike GASPACS, these Raspberry Pi are specially hardened to spend an extended period of time in space.

Deepest Raspberry Pi

Maka Niu sitting 1500 m underwater — possibly able to do 6000 m — is no mean feat

Going deep underwater is hard. The deeper you go, the more the weight of the water above you becomes a huge issue, and human-made devices need to be able to withstand immense pressure in the depths. That’s why your watch may only be rated to 100 m underwater — go any deeper, and stuff will start to break.

A descent of 1500 metres — nearly a mile underwater — is very, very far. At this depth in salt water, pressure is 148 atmospheres, or 148 times the normal air pressure at sea level.

Maka Niu is a very special system then, able to safely contain a Raspberry Pi Zero and Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2 in a low-cost device — opening up citizen science to more folks, and helping to explore the largely unknown deep sea.

Highest clock speed

Reaching a limit of 3.6GHz

‘Fastest Raspberry Pi’ can really mean two things, which is why we’ve awkwardly titled this ‘highest clock speed’. Every new-numbered model of Raspberry Pi is slightly faster than the last, but the question for some people is: how fast?

It works, but it’s not very practical — it’s just a test after all

Overclocking computer hardware — telling it to run faster than it was designed to, i.e. increasing its clock speed — is an age-old tradition amongst tech nerds. The caveat is that this tends to make the hardware hotter and can damage it in the long run. In normal overclock scenarios, this is solved with liquid cooling or other cooling solutions, but if you want to take a chip to its absolute limits, you need something really cold: liquid nitrogen.

With a specialised tube over a Raspberry Pi 5, Pieter-Jan Plaisier poured liquid nitrogen directly onto the chip as it ran at 3.6GHz. Can it go higher? Supposedly not — at 3.7 GHz, the system crashed, and not because of the heat.

Hottest Raspberry Pi?

What is the hottest environment a Raspberry Pi operates in? Unfortunately, we couldn’t find an answer, but some have operated in deserts that regularly clock 40°C (104°F). The real trick here is that, with good enough cooling, you can have a Raspberry Pi operate in environments with very high temperature; the BCM2712 chip that runs Raspberry Pi will operate at temperatures as high as 80–85°C (176–185°F) before throttling is enabled.

Coldest Raspberry Pi

Arribada Penguin Monitoring — it gets to −60°C in the Antarctic winters

Sending any equipment to Antarctica is tricky: it gets very, very cold there. When your tech accidentally stays there for three years and remains working, that is quite the feat. The Arribada Penguin Monitoring project (accidentally) managed that; the team was unable to pick up the camera at the end of 2019 and then, well, the world shut down in 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While the temperature regularly falls below −30°C (−22°F), it can reach −60°C (−76°F) in the winter. Antarctica is very large though, and depending on the placement of the camera, the temperature will be different. Having said that, after three years in the frigid wasteland, the Arribada camera returned home safely with 32,764 photos for the researchers to go through.

Raspberry Pi operating temperatures

Compute Module 4 recently got an extended temperature variant, giving it an even lower operating temperature of −40°C (−40°F). Many parts of the world, not just Antarctica, can get to below −20°C (−4°F), which is the standard lowest operating range of other Raspberry Pi products. 85°C/185°F is the highest operating temperature of Raspberry Pi.

Largest Raspberry Pi

There are a few huge, working Raspberry Pis. A 10× Raspberry Pi 3 was shown off at Maker Faire Bay Area in 2016, and Raspberry Pi’s own Toby Roberts built a 6× Raspberry Pi 4 for a little exhibition in the shopping centre where the official Raspberry Pi Store resides. This 12× working Raspberry Pi takes the crown, though, designed and 3D-printed by Zach Hipps.

Raspberry Pi 3; human being for scale

The PCB is made from plywood, the GPIO pins are made from aluminium tubing, and over 5 kg of PLA filament was used for the other large-scale components. “I connected my Raspberry Pi to all the large-scale connectors with extension cables,” Zach told us when we spoke to him a few years ago. “I plugged in a monitor and keyboard, and everything fired right up!”

Smallest Raspberry Pi

While some tiny RP2040/RP2350 boards are technically the smallest Raspberry Pi products, the smallest standard Raspberry Pi computer is Raspberry Pi Zero. However, you can make it smaller still — 5 mm smaller as it goes. Raspberry Pi Zero v1.3 has a camera connector which can be removed, and with no circuits in that section of the board, you can trim it. Check out this forum post about it.

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Build a Raspberry Pi setup for children aged 3 to 6

In the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, we invited Dr Andrew Lewis, a specialist fabricator and maker, to explain why, in a world where we are immersed in technology, there are still some young people who struggle to use a desktop computer. Here, he also explains how you can help break that trend by introducing the next generation to skills they might build their future careers on.

In the modern world, desktop computers are increasingly rare. Laptop computers, mobile phones, and tablet computers with touchscreens are ubiquitous, while the traditional mouse and keyboard are less easily discovered. Learning to type and use a computer is a valuable skill for kids, but you can’t just sit a young child in front of a laptop or desktop computer and let them play unsupervised. Aside from the obvious security issues, a desktop computer is not designed with the needs of small children in mind. This article covers some of the issues you will encounter if you decide to make a real computer for a young human, and offers some potential solutions.

It seems strange, but in a world where we are immersed in technology, there are still some young people who struggle to use a desktop computer simply because they’ve never been exposed to a physical keyboard and mouse

In the context of this article, when we talk about ‘young children’ or ‘small children’, it mostly means children around the ages of three to six. Unlike in a Bethesda game, children in the real world are all different, and what’s appropriate for one child might not be appropriate for another. It’s up to parents to decide what is or isn’t safe or appropriate for their own children.

A small computer like Raspberry Pi 500 is ideal for older children to learn with, but for young children (around four years old), there are certain factors that make rolling your own machine from a Raspberry Pi a more attractive solution. So what exactly are the issues you should consider when thinking about making a computer for younger children, and what sort of machine are we looking to build?

Firstly, little hands are very good at pulling cables they’re not supposed to, and delicate plugs and sockets like USB cables are likely to get pulled out. Securing these plugs using cable ties and sticky pads will go a long way towards keeping the machine running. The same goes for SD cards, which small fingers are very adept at removing if they are accessible enough. The most sensible way to deal with this is to hide everything inside a box of some description; whether that’s a pre-made project case or a custom 3D-printed enclosure that supports the monitor is up to you.

A static address

Making a computer that’s too large to be easily portable is a great way to prevent unwanted access and enforce a schedule. With a small tablet or smartphone, a child can walk away from you into a different room or position the screen so that it’s difficult for you to see what they’re doing. A desktop computer does exactly what its name suggests — it sits on a desktop. It provides a fixed location where your child can sit down and use the computer. If you ever took typing classes, you’ll know that posture and position are important when using a keyboard.

One of the biggest advantages to using a Raspberry Pi 5 over a Raspberry Pi 500 for younger children is that you are not tied to using the stock keyboard. Young children are more familiar with lower-case letters and usually have less fine motor control than adults; the small keys and upper-case lettering on traditional keyboards can be confusing to some children. Additionally, it’s very common for children to be long-sighted. It makes sense if you think about it, since a child has smaller eyes than an adult. The eye simply isn’t developed enough, and the lens focuses light behind the retina instead of directly on it. This means that while they might be able to see a monitor or projector screen in a classroom, objects closer to them, like keyboards or books, are more difficult to focus on. A purpose-built children’s keyboard with a large font and larger keys takes care of this issue, and can be swapped out for a regular keyboard as the child grows.

A colourful keyboard designed for children can be educational even when it isn’t plugged in — the colours on this keyboard help to differentiate between vowels, consonants, numbers, and control keys; the larger keys and text are also easier to read, making it easier to type without mistakes

A standard computer mouse is far too big for a small child to use comfortably, so it doesn’t take much thought to solve that problem: use a smaller mouse instead. However, learning to use a mouse properly takes time, and until they master the skill, children are likely to get frustrated every time they use the computer. For this reason, it helps to have a computer monitor with a touchscreen matrix. If they are struggling to do something on the computer using the mouse, they can just touch the screen and then carry on using the mouse when they are more confident. In that case, you don’t want to give the child a giant monitor unless you want them to get a sore neck and arms. Although young people these days no longer sit in front of a glass vacuum tube with an electron gun firing at their faces, a large monitor can still be overwhelming and uncomfortable for a child to use. 

The idea that less is more is carried through from the monitor to the speakers. Ideally, you’ll have a monitor with a small set of built-in speakers. If not, a very cheap set of Bluetooth speakers will do fine. When it comes to children, you really don’t want them to be louder than necessary. 

With all these considerations in mind, you should be able to assemble a suitable Raspberry Pi setup for a child to use. The last practical consideration is to hide every plug, socket, and cable as much as possible, in a way that is still attractive to the child. 3D-printed covers for the monitor sockets and stands to make a portable monitor look like a desktop monitor go a long way towards achieving this.

Some children may have never seen a real-life desktop computer, but they’ve probably seen them on TV or in books. They’ll expect their computer to look like the representations they’ve seen, and might be a bit confused or disappointed if it doesn’t. A great way to engage them with the computer is to let them decorate the outside with stickers and choose their own desktop background. If you’re designing a custom 3D-printed case, it’s worth adding plenty of flat surfaces for them to get creative and decorate.

Control the internet

You don’t want to unleash your child onto a completely open computer, so let’s deal with some of the big software and networking issues. At the fundamental level, young children do not need access to the internet at all. Preventing access to the internet can be done in several ways; the easiest is to provide no access to networking. No Wi-Fi passwords, no cable connections. This is a 100% guaranteed way to prevent children from accessing something they shouldn’t. A 2 m ‘air gap’ leaks no data.

There are of course other methods of limiting access to the internet, such as changing to a child-safe DNS like the OpenDNS Family Shield, or using a Pi-hole or Squid proxy in your home network. The sad reality is that filtering technology is not a perfect replacement for parental supervision, and you’ll never be able to shield a child completely from the shadier side of the web without a Faraday cage. However, if you are set on providing some internet access to young children, then a combination of these technologies, as well as close supervision, education, and logging, are about as effective as you will ever get. If your four-year-old is secretly an elite member of an underground hacking community, your results may vary. 

GCompris is an excellent educational package for children — however, the current Raspberry Pi installer has a missing dependency file, which breaks some of the games; make sure you install qt5-image-formats-plugins separately, or some of the games will be hopelessly broken and have missing graphics

The safer air gap approach doesn’t necessarily mean starving your children of knowledge or access to everything the web has to offer. Some people forget that the internet is relatively new, and for all the streaming content it provides, there are generally offline methods for presenting the same information. For example, the Kiwix project provides a way to view websites offline. There’s a whole list of pre-packaged sites to install, including Wikipedia, Vikidia (a children’s encyclopaedia), children’s story books, and even curated collections aimed specifically at children. If you can’t find what you need in the Kiwix library, there are tools to package your own sites. There’s also nothing to prevent you from augmenting the static information on their computer with DVD, CD, MP3, or streaming content provided from your own tablet or mobile phone. In fact, the distinction that “this is your computer for working, this is a tablet/TV for watching videos” can be a useful one for younger children, stopping them from becoming fixated on a specific device.

The ever-popular Tuxpaint is an excellent application for young people to experiment with, for multiple reasons. It’s a fun drawing app that helps teach fine motor and mouse control, but it also has a huge selection of buttons and menus to navigate through. Once your child starts clicking through the dozens of options and exploring the painting application, any fear of exploring other apps on the computer will diminish. In fact, Raspberry Pi itself is part of this idea. Let your child loose on the operating system. The worst they will do is break it, and with a Raspberry Pi and a backup SD card, it’s only a few minutes’ work to get things up and running again. You could create a new user and lock down the desktop to only the items you want your child to access, but because a Raspberry Pi can be reinstalled very quickly, it might be less effort to keep a backup SD card ready and let them break things.

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Raspberry Pi and SECO: Clea software for IIoT available natively in Raspberry Pi OS

Raspberry Pi and SECO continue to lead innovation in Industrial IoT (IIoT) through a partnership that brings together Raspberry Pi’s powerful, flexible computing platforms with SECO’s expertise in edge computing and HMI (Human-Machine Interface) solutions. As part of our ongoing commitment to supporting industrial customers, SECO’s Clea software is now available natively in Raspberry Pi OS, making it simpler to build and maintain IIoT applications.

Clea now easily available on Raspberry Pi OS

SECO’s Clea software is a comprehensive suite for managing and deploying edge applications, and it’s available natively in the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS. This streamlined integration makes it easier than ever to develop and deploy industrial applications, pairing the performance and reliability of Raspberry Pi with the advanced management capabilities of Clea.

“Industrial developers want to move fast without compromising reliability or security,” said Fausto Di Segni, SECO’s European Head of IoT and AI. “By making Clea available natively in Raspberry Pi OS, we’re removing friction from the development process and enabling a faster path to scalable, production-grade IoT solutions.”

How to install Clea

Getting started with Clea on Raspberry Pi OS is as simple as running a few commands in the terminal:

Enable Clea’s apt repo:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y apt-repo-clea

Install:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y astarte-message-hub edgehog-device-runtime
sudo apt install -y edgehog-device-runtime-forwarder

Full setup instructions are available in the Clea OS Get Started guide for Raspberry Pi.

Clea equips industrial users with robust features including remote device management, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and secure data handling, all capabilities critical to modern IIoT deployments. You’ll find comprehensive documentation from Clea to guide you through the features.

SECO’s new Compute Module 5-based HMI

In late 2024, SECO announced its Pi Vision 10.1 CM5, an HMI built on Raspberry Pi’s Compute Module 5. Designed for industrial integration in demanding environments, this robust and feature-rich new device takes advantage of the power of Compute Module 5 to to meet the needs of industrial customers for performance and longevity at scale.

With production readiness at its core, the Pi Vision 10.1 CM5 provides a seamless path from prototype to deployment, helping customers to accelerate development and simplify the transition to volume manufacturing.

The SECO Pi Vision 10.1 CM5 is a prime example of how our two companies are bringing cutting-edge solutions to the industrial market without compromising flexibility and ease of use.

A partnership focused on driving innovation

The collaboration between Raspberry Pi and SECO is built on shared goals: to lower barriers to industrial innovation and to provide scalable, secure, and versatile IIoT solutions. By combining Raspberry Pi’s accessible, high-performance computing platforms with SECO’s industrial expertise, the partnership delivers powerful, innovative and practical tools for industrial customers.

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Raspberry Pi Pico 2 Snake game console

It’s Maker Monday, on which we like to showcase excellent builds by the Raspberry Pi community. This one made its way into the latest issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine and was created by our friend Arnov Sharma.

If you owned a Nokia mobile phone in the late 1990s, then you will likely remember the game Snake. It came preloaded on the Nokia 6110 in 1997 and took the world by storm as users — including a host of celebrities — became utterly enthralled by the simple premise and potential of racking up a high score.

Although you might have expected a Snake game to be written in Python, this one was developed using a variant of C++

For those unaware, Snake was a spin on the 1976 game Blockade by Gremlin Industries, and the idea was that players would control a limbless reptile around a small area, gobbling up food while trying to avoid making the snake hit itself. With each bite, the snake would grow longer, making it more likely to collide with the walls or its own tail. So, it took quite a bit of skill to precisely move around the screen — a task made more difficult using a phone’s hard keypad. 

Arnov Sharma was reminded of this game when he got hold of a matrix panel. Given the blocky, pixelated nature of Snake’s rather primitive graphics, he realised the panel could lend itself to a replication of the game, so he began to consider the practicalities of producing a unique game console.

“My objective or goal for developing this project was to create a gaming console that used my 64×32 P3 matrix panel,” he says of a Waveshare unit he purchased from PBCWay for $22. “I thought this console would be useful for coding simple games.”

With that in mind, he began to think about how it would be powered and how this large screen could be comfortably held and controlled.

The LEDs are used to great effect to clearly show when the player’s game has come to an end; the resulting score is displayed in the top-right corner

Recreating hiss-tory  

Since Arnov was looking to create retro-style games — the likes of which were commonplace back in the 1970s and 1980s — he decided he didn’t need the immense processing power offered by a Raspberry Pi 5. At the same time, he realised he would still require a powerful device that had a fast CPU, a good amount of RAM, and flash storage, so he decided he would create a streamlined build based around Raspberry Pi Pico 2.

“This project’s code was quite large and it involved the use of a matrix library, which requires speed and computing power,” he explains. “Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was ideal for this project.”

At the rear of the console is a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 microcontroller connected to a custom-designed PCB and powered by an 18650 lithium battery; this is powerful enough to run a game of Snake quickly and smoothly

Once the main two components were selected, Arnov then turned his attention to how the game console would be controlled and how it would look. With such a large screen, it made sense to have the controller on one side and something to grip on the other.

Fang-tastic timing

In that sense, the game console would resemble the Nintendo Switch to some extent, although this format also conjures up memories of Sony’s PlayStation Portable. In any case, he reckoned that the types of games he would create wouldn’t need more than a D-pad (that is, a set of four directional buttons: up, down, left, and right), although this did mean foregoing a fire button. “The most basic game I was able to create in a week was the classic Snake game,” says Arnov. This took up most of the project’s development time.

“I completed the entire project in one day, but it took me a week to finalise the code,” he notes. This is impressive, since the project entailed building a 3D model of the console using Autodesk Fusion 360 and working out where the components would go. A custom Pico Driver Board and Button Board were also designed using PCB CAD software. These were produced by PCBWay.

“I created a frame-like part that transforms the matrix into a handheld game console,” Arnov explains. “The hardware also features a power circuit that includes a power management IC, a lithium cell, and a few mandatory components. This setup powers both the matrix and Pico.”

“The main challenge was the onboard power source; I created a customised circuit that houses the power management IC that powers the matrix and Pico. The challenge was to make the circuit smaller and lighter. I am still thinking about making it smaller, which I may address in a future edition.”

Since Snake only requires directional controls, the console has just four buttons

Scaling up

Assembling the components was relatively straightforward. “The setup works by connecting Pico 2’s GPIOs to the matrix’s HUB75 connector and using necessary libraries to control the matrix,” Arnov says.

“To power Pico 2 and the matrix, we used a power circuit that uses a lithium ion cell with a nominal voltage of 3.7V. However, Pico 2 and the matrix require a stable 5V, so we used a power management system to boost the cell voltage from 3.7V to 5V. We added a button board with I/O pins that connect to Pico 2’s GPIO pins to control the snake’s movements.”

Arnov tested out the build using a cellular automation called Game of Life, which was created in 1970 by British mathematician John Horton Conway. He had previously converted the code for another project, which had allowed him to see something happening on the screen, so he knew the connections and configuration worked. He was then able to turn his attention to producing a game. “In terms of coding, this was put together from scratch,” he says.

Arnov represented the snake as a series of green LEDs and the food as randomly appearing red LEDs, which the player must ‘eat’ by using the buttons to direct the legless reptile towards them. When the snake collides with the red dot, its length expands and the on-screen score is updated. If the snake collides with itself, the screen freezes, turns red, and displays the words ‘Game Over’ along with the final score. 

A new game is ready to play within five seconds, which gives the player enough time to grab a modern smartphone and take a quick photo if the score is impressively high. Given how addictive Snake is, the player is then likely to get stuck in once more — but Arnov is now considering which other classics he may be able to play on his portable console. “I’d need to build them myself or port an existing game, but that’s something for the future,” he says.

Arnov builds lots of cool things — subscribe to his YouTube channel for more

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Raspberry Pi Connect is out of beta: simple remote access, now even better

It’s been just over a year since we launched the Raspberry Pi Connect beta, giving you simple, remote access to your Raspberry Pi straight out of the box, from anywhere in the world. The response from users has been fantastic, and we rapidly reached an install base of over 100,000 devices. Today we’re excited to announce that following the recent release of version 2.5, we’re dropping the “beta”.

Smarter wake-ups: data-efficient connections in v2.5

Prior to version 2.5, the Connect client software running on a Raspberry Pi device connected to the service would poll continually Raspberry Pi servers for requests to connect. This worked well for us because it was easy to scale – traffic was a predictable shape; there was just a lot of it. But wasn’t ideal for users – their devices were regularly waking up to make HTTP requests, and data usage was higher than it needed to be.

Starting with version 2.5, the Connect client now holds a single long-lived HTTP connection to a Raspberry Pi server.  Now when you click the “Connect” button on connect.raspberrypi.com, an event is broadcast to the device to wake it up and start the process of establishing a connection.

Optimised heartbeat for leaner dashboard updates

Separately from connection negotiation, the Connect client sends heartbeats to Raspberry Pi servers, periodically and also on startup and shutdown of a device and in response to changes to its internal state. For example, the user disallowing screen sharing via the CLI (command line interface) would trigger a heartbeat. This information is then used to keep your dashboard on connect.raspberrypi.com up to date. 

Prior to version 2.5, the Connect client would send four heartbeats in rapid succession; this wasn’t a conscious design decision, but a side effect of how the client evolved over time. Starting with 2.5, these heartbeats are now debounced, and users should see many fewer requests to the Connect API outside of connection negotiation.

Also starting in 2.5, each individual heartbeat is now compressed before it is sent to the server, making it about 50% smaller.

How to update

To update to the latest version of Raspberry Pi Connect only, run the following commands (if you have installed Connect Lite, replace rpi-connect with rpi-connect-lite):

sudo apt update
sudo apt install --only-upgrade rpi-connect

This week’s other Raspberry Pi software news is that we’ve released a new version of Raspberry Pi OS; this has the latest version of Connect installed, so you might want to consider updating your OS. Read our post about the new release for instructions on how to do that.

If you haven’t tried Connect yet, check out our official guide to get it up and running on your devices.

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A new Raspberry Pi OS release

We’ve just published a new version of Raspberry Pi OS — our recommended (and free) operating system for all Raspberry Pi computers — and it’s now available for download. Scroll to the bottom of this post to find instructions for updating, or read on to find out what has changed.

As many of you already know, Debian Linux works on a two-year release cycle – every odd-numbered year, a new major version is released, and it being 2025, there will be one in the next few months.

So this is probably the final release of Raspberry Pi OS which is based on Debian ‘bookworm’, before Debian ‘trixie’ is released this summer. The last full release we made was back in November last year, and there have been quite a few changes since then, so here’s a summary of the most important.

Screen locking

We’ve installed a modified version of the swaylock screen locking application. Anyone who has used swaylock will be familiar with its somewhat minimal interface – when you lock the screen, you just get a completely white screen with no indication of what has happened or what you need to do. We felt this was a bit unhelpful, so we’ve added a custom front end which gives a bit more feedback as to what is happening and what you need to do to unlock it again!

You can now lock the screen by pressing Ctrl-Alt-L, or by choosing ‘Shutdown…’ from the main menu and selecting Lock Screen in the dialog. You’ll then see the lock screen, with a password entry box.

Type in your password, hit Enter, and the desktop should return.

Auto login options

In Linux desktops, it is usually possible to access a command-line console (known as a TTY) by pressing Ctrl-Alt and one of the function keys from 1 to 7. We have always set up Raspberry Pi Desktop so that if you boot to the desktop and enable auto login, then the TTY on Ctrl-Alt-F1 is also automatically logged in. If you use the screen lock described above, this gives a potential security hole, as the TTY switches are not disabled when the screen is locked.

What this means is that if you lock the screen, you should need to enter a password to be able to access the Raspberry Pi desktop again. But if a TTY is also logged in, someone can just hit Ctrl-Alt-F1, switch to the logged-in TTY, and gain access to the computer.

In order to prevent this, we have now separated console and desktop auto login options. On a new image, both console and desktop are automatically logged in, but if you want to prevent someone using this to get around the screen lock, we recommend turning off console auto login. There are now controls for this both in Raspberry Pi Configuration and in raspi-config.

New Printers application

To connect to and control printers, we have been shipping the system-config-printer application, which is a Python application with a slightly quirky and untidy user interface. For this release, we have ported the printer control plugin from the GNOME desktop control centre into a standalone Printers application (along with fixing a few of GNOME’s more puzzling user interface decisions…). The new application can be found in the Preferences section of the main menu, and should hopefully make managing printers a bit more intuitive.

Better touchscreen handling

Touchscreen handling in Wayland is relatively new and sometimes doesn’t do everything you might hope. We hit a problem when we first moved to Wayland in that some touch features, like the ability to double-click, were simply not available, and we had to find a workaround.

What we did was to enable mouse emulation by default, whereby touchscreens just pretend to be mice – when you tap the touchscreen, it generates a mouse click instead of a touch, and if you tap it twice, it generates a double-click. The problem with this was that it meant that touch-specific features, like swiping the screen to scroll, were disabled, and some people noticed their absence.

For this release, we are making it easy for touchscreen users to choose whether they want mouse emulation behaviour, or native touchscreen behaviour. There is a new menu under the ‘Touchscreen’ section of the context-sensitive menu in Screen Configuration.

The main disadvantage of no longer using mouse emulation is that it isn’t possible to double-click by tapping the screen twice, and this makes navigation in the file manager rather difficult. There are a couple of workarounds specific to the file manager: you can enable ‘Open files with single click’ in the file manager preferences, or use a tap-and-hold to open the context-sensitive menu and then choose ‘Open’.

Hopefully, at some point Wayland touchscreen support will be mature enough that it is no longer necessary to offer this option, but in the meantime, this lets users choose their preferred behaviour.

Other changes

This release is running version 0.8.1 of the labwc Wayland window manager – this is a couple of releases behind the very latest version, but has had a lot of testing and is very stable. We’ll be updating this to a newer version in the near future. We are also now running on version 6.12 of the Linux kernel for this release.

The Squeekboard virtual keyboard for use with touchscreens has been modified to allow users with multiple monitor configurations to choose the screen on which it is shown – the relevant option is on the Display tab of Raspberry Pi Configuration.

Unfortunately, due to changes made by the authors of the Chromium web browser, it is no longer possible to pre-install the uBlock Origin adblocker. As a result of this, from this release onwards, we are pre-installing the slightly less full-featured uBlock Origin Lite.

A lot of work has gone into optimising the startup of the wf-panel-pi application used to create the taskbar in Wayland, and this has resulted in a noticeable improvement in the time taken for the desktop to start after the Raspberry Pi is booted.

In another performance optimisation, we have stopped using the zenity tool to create prompts and dialogs from the command line, and have written a more efficient tool of our own, called zenoty – this saves installing some packages which were slowing down startup.

There have also been a lot of changes under the hood aimed at making maintenance of the desktop more straightforward and easer to manage going forward into trixie, but they shouldn’t (hopefully) be noticed by most users.

And of course there have been dozens of the usual small tweaks to fix bugs, add new translations, and just generally tidy things up.

How do I get it?

As is usual, you can do most of the update automatically via apt. Just open a terminal and type

sudo apt update

sudo apt full-upgrade

While the upgrade is in progress, you may get prompts asking you to confirm changes to configuration files; just answer Y for yes to these.

If you want to write a fresh image to an SD card or other media, visit our software page, where you can download Raspberry Pi Imager – the most straightforward way for most users to prepare a new SD card – or browse download options to install manually.

We hope you find the new changes useful – as always, do let us have any feedback in the comments or on the forums.

Make the most of the last few months with Bookworm!

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Lower prices for 4GB and 8GB Compute Module 4

At Raspberry Pi, our mission is to make computing accessible and affordable for everyone and for businesses at every scale, so today we’re delighted to announce a reduction in the price of some of the most popular variants of Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. From now, if you buy a standard operating temperature Compute Module 4 from a Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller, it will cost you $5 less for a 4GB RAM variant, and $10 less for an 8GB RAM variant.

Broader access to a proven platform

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is the cornerstone of an astonishing variety of applications, from medical equipment to energy services infrastructure and from concrete monitoring to retro gaming. There is a vast number of embedded use cases that don’t require the processing heft of our new (ish) Compute Module 5; by lowering the cost of the higher-memory-density variants of its predecessor, we aim to make these projects more cost-effective, and to unlock new ones that previously weren’t viable. We hope the price drop will introduce new possibilities both for businesses and for enthusiasts, helping you bring into existence products and projects we’d never even imagined.

Here’s a quick overview of the new pricing:

More room to innovate, same trusted performance

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 continues to offer the same powerful features that have made it a favourite with designers and developers: with its quad-core Arm Cortex-A72 processor, extensive I/O capabilities, and flexible form factor, it remains the perfect choice for a wide range of applications. We hope that these new lower prices will make it a little bit easier to get your hands on the hardware you need.

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How to build a home recording studio with Raspberry Pi 500: choose and install your software

It’s time to install and set up the software you’ll need for high-quality audio production in your home recording studio. This is the third and final part of a tutorial from Raspberry Pi Official Magazine; to follow the whole series, skip back to the first part, about setting up your recording space, and then the second, which will help you choose your equipment.

Raspberry Pi OS, like most other Linux distributions, comes with a wide range of audio production software of somewhat variable quality. We’ll guide you through your options for audio. We’re going to use JACK2 for low-latency audio alongside PipeWire for system audio, with a pipewire-pulse compatibility layer to route between JACK and standard desktop applications.

It’s the home stretch for our Raspberry Pi 500 home recording studio tutorial!

First, open a terminal and install the audio software:

$ sudo apt install jackd2 qjackctl pipewire‑pulse qsynth guitarix 

With that done, enter:

$ qjackctl

Click ‘setup’, and in the Settings tab, make sure the driver is set to ALSA and the MIDI driver is set to raw. Click Advanced and make sure your audio interface is set as the output device and, if you have a standalone USB MIDI keyboard, that it’s set as the input device. Finally, click the Options tab and put the following into the ‘Execute script after startup’ section:

pacmd set-default-sink jack_out && pacmd set‑default-source jack_in

Setting up your audio interface

Most USB audio interfaces are class-compliant, so will work on Linux, but you might encounter issues with devices that rely on proprietary software to configure them or update their firmware.

We chose a Focusrite 2i2 for our studio setup because it has full Linux support thanks to cooperation between Focusrite and the Linux kernel development community, and the hard work of driver developer Geoffrey Bennett in particular.

We’re fans of Reaper’s excellent FX interface for PCM audio and capable MIDI input options

Ensure that you have a compatible version of the kernel – Focusrite audio interface support is built into Linux kernel 6.8 and above. At the time of writing, the default Raspberry Pi kernel was 6.6.74+rpt-rpi-2712; this doesn’t include the module for the 2i2, but fortunately the testing kernel (6.12) does.

You first step should be to check your kernel version. By the time this article is in your hands, the default kernel may have been updated to 6.12. Let’s find out. Open a terminal and type:

$ uname -a

If it reports a kernel version below 6.8, update to the experimental new kernel:

$ sudo rpi-update

$ reboot

Install the Focusrite control interface

$ git clone https://github.com/geoffreybennett/alsa-scarlett-gui.git
$ cd /home/kg/Software/alsa-scarlett-gui-0.4.0
$ cd alsa-scarlett-gui-0.4.0/
$ sudo apt -y install git make gcc libgtk-4-dev libasound2-dev libssl-dev
$ cd src
$ make -j4

Test to make sure that it works:

$ ./alsa-scarlett-gui

Then install it system-wide:

$ sudo make install

The Focusrite Scarlett GUI should be automatically added to the Other section of the main menu. You can use it to update your Scarlett’s firmware, connect and activate various inputs, contain gain, and more.

Microphone selection 

We use a Blue Yeti Pro condenser mic connected via XLR, rather than via its integrated USB audio interface. While you can use multiple audio interfaces, it’s easiest to manage latency and audio routing with a single device. If you use a dynamic microphone, like our Shure SM-58, you’ll want a pre-amp, such as Triton Audio’s convenient in-line FetHead. This connects to the cable between your mic and audio interface and give you a boost of 27 dB, which means that you won’t have to turn the gain up so high on your USB audio device. Cheaper in-line pre-amps with a little less boost are also available, as are many more expensive ones. This is a useful because many USB audio interfaces hit their signal-to-noise threshold at a little about 50% gain, which can lead to a staticky hiss on your recordings.

Your MIDI keyboard

We use various MIDI instruments, including a Novation LaunchKey 49 keyboard and an Alesis Vortex Wireless 2 keytar. Connect USB keyboards to Raspberry Pi directly or via a powered USB hub – unpowered hubs don’t provide sufficient power.

QjackCtl’s connection graph looks messy but makes connecting MIDI inputs particularly easy

Drivers can be an issue under Linux, but recent Novation devices can be managed and updated in a Chromium-based browser via a web app. This is still a relatively unusual feature, but other brands with web app firmware updaters include PirateMIDI, Morningstar, and PandaMIDI.  Our Alesis doesn’t require any firmware management, nor do older MIDI keyboards connected via USB MIDI adapters.

Once your keyboard is set up, the easiest way to test it is via Qsynth, a GUI frontend for Fluidsynth. This ships with an accurate, high-quality General MIDI voice set, but you can use it to load any SoundFont (SF2) file, such as the opl3-soundfont you’ll find in the repositories.

Instant FX rack

Guitarix lets you stack digital guitar pedals and other effects to give you the equivalent of hundreds of pounds worth of stomp-boxes and tools like a guitar tuner. These effects can also be used in most DAWs (digital audio workstations), with some being particularly well suited for integration with one or the other, such as a range of Ardour-specific LV2 effects. You can use these, as well as LADSPA effects, with Guitarix, while the DAWs also support VST3 and CLAP plug-ins, among others.

When downloading digital effects, you’ll have to find files built for aarch64 architecture or compile them yourself. Fortunately, there are plenty in the repositories. Some useful effects will be installed along with Guitarix to get you started.

Setting up a DAW

A digital audio workstation (DAW) is a complete environment for recording and producing music using either MIDI or live analogue instruments connected via your audio interface. Reaper, Ardour, FruityLoops-like LLMS, and lightweight favourite Qtractor are capable tools, as is PCM-audio focused Audacity and its forks.

There’s an incredibly polished Linux control GUI for Focusrite Scarlett hardware. Note the virtual cables connecting hardware inputs to PCM audio sinks

We’re pushing the limits of what Raspberry Pi 500 can do when it comes to some of these applications. Most PCM recorders, with the notable exception of Qtractor, struggled to keep their visual waveform display in time with the audio recording, although the resulting audio capture was perfect. Some processor-intensive synth voices and effects also affected performance of the DAW.

Most of these tools can be installed directly from the command line:

$ sudo apt install lmms audacity ardour qtractor

Reaper is commercial software, but is very reasonably priced at $60 (£46), and is highly customisable, with a clear interface, loads of features, and a generous free trial.

To install Reaper, download the latest Linux aarch64 version of the software and extract it. Open a terminal and cd to the directory where you extracted it:

$ cd reaper_linux_aarch64/

$ ./install-reaper.sh 

Type I to install it, then 1 to put it in /opt, Y to add a desktop integration, Y to symlink paths, and Y to proceed. Provide your sudo password when prompted. Reaper will be added to the Sound & Video section of the Raspberry Pi OS main menu.

Making connections

Once you’ve started JACK’s control interface, the Focusrite Scarlett GUI, and your music software of choice, you’ll quite probably find that you’re not actually hearing sound where you expect to. Both the Scarlett GUI and JACK’s graphic interface require you to make connections between devices to make sure they’re talking to each other properly, as shown in our screenshots.

We’d love to know if you use these tutorials to set up a recording studio of your own, or if you already have experience using the software discussed here with Raspberry Pi. Tell us in the comments.

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Sustainable solutions with Raspberry Pi: how intrusive reflow soldering boosted our efficiency and cut our carbon footprint

We’ve reduced product returns by half, cut our manufacturing time by 15%, and eliminated 43 tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year by changing the way we solder connectors onto our computers.

In product design and manufacture, small changes often drive big differences in environmental impact, and at Raspberry Pi we’ve always made sure we have a thorough understanding of the processes used to manufacture our products so that we can spot ways to improve them. In the run-up to Raspberry Pi 5, we worked with our manufacturing partner Sony to implement a technique called intrusive reflow soldering, an adjustment that has improved product quality, reduced waste, and lowered our environmental impact.

Solving the through-hole bottleneck

Through-hole connectors have long been a sticking point in efficient production. They require robust solder joints made through the printed circuit board itself, meaning they can’t simply be handled by the standard processes used with SMT (Surface Mount Technology, aka pick-and-place) machines. Because of this, we have always endeavoured to minimise the number of through-hole parts, and this type of mounting is typically reserved for connectors. In the early days of Raspberry Pi, these parts were inserted by hand, and later by robotic placement. There then followed a wave soldering step — an additional process involving a molten solder bath which the boards pass through. This added time, cost, and complexity to our production line.

Thanks to our work with Sony, we have eliminated all of the through-hole–specific actions from our manufacturing processes. With intrusive reflow, we can now place through-hole connectors using the same pick-and-place machines we already use for surface-mount parts; this means there is no longer any need for bespoke robotics, or for an additional soldering stage. Over a series of trials, we perfected component placement, tweaked the solder paste stencil, refined the PCB layout, adapted the connector design, and adjusted the inspection process. We validated the results against our stringent quality control, successfully achieving all the standards that we set ourselves.

A new manufacturing standard for Raspberry Pi 5 and beyond

This became the production process that we have used on all Raspberry Pi 5 computers, and we’re working to roll it out to the manufacture of our earlier models too.

A Raspberry Pi 5 with intrusive reflow soldering and a Raspberry Pi 4 with wave soldering

The change delivered a marked increase in product quality, with a massive 50% reduction in product returns. It also increased the speed at which products are manufactured by 15%. Work In Process (WIP) inventory was eliminated entirely, as there is no longer any break in the production line, all the way from bare boards coming into the factory to finished Raspberry Pi computers being packaged into boxes. And removing a set of machinery — the selective solder bath — from the production line reduced the CO₂ output of our production by 43 tonnes per year.

Smarter manufacturing, smaller footprint

Raspberry Pi’s move to intrusive reflow soldering shows how targeted changes in manufacturing can lead to significant improvements in sustainability. By cutting energy use, eliminating wasteful intermediate steps, and improving product quality, we’re reducing our environmental impact while making our production more efficient. It’s one of many ongoing efforts to manufacture more responsibly and more sustainably.

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Zero-G Laboratory floating platform

Helping explore space by building earthbound robots. In the brand new issue of Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, Rob Zwetsloot investigates the final frontier.

Zero gravity is weird. Most of us can’t really conceptualise a weightless environment like you experience on space missions, and there’s even a difference between pressurised atmospheres inside a spacecraft and a vacuum as well. Even the tiniest variable can affect things. To better understand the various effects, special equipment has to be created.

The fully constructed platform looks like a strange K’Nex set

“The Zero-G Laboratory is specifically designed to emulate scenarios like spacecraft rendezvous, docking, capture, and other interactions between spacecraft,” Barış Can Yalçin of the SpaceR team tells us. “It is equipped with advanced infrastructure, including space-like lighting conditions, a motion capture system, an epoxy floor, mounted robotic rails, and the capability to integrate onboard computers and large mock-ups. These features enable researchers to conduct a wide range of experiments for unique orbital scenarios, allowing for hybrid emulations with robots that integrate hardware and pre-modelled software components. The facility can be operated in real time and can accurately emulate orbital robotics scenarios.”

Filling a need

Space is still a huge industry, and labs like this are created to make sure missions are safe and reliable.

“Orbital Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing (OSAM), Active Space Debris Removal (ADR), and Asteroid Mining (AM) are becoming increasingly significant in both research and commercial sectors,” Barış says. “Earth’s orbits are filling up with outdated space assets, while the number of planned missions is set to rise sharply in the coming years. Additionally, there are plans to establish multiple space stations and large structures in Earth’s orbits over the next decade, which will be partially assembled and/or manufactured in space. These activities require higher levels of autonomy and close interaction. To ensure safe, secure, and reliable in-orbit operations, it is essential to validate and verify Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) algorithms on the ground before launching missions. Consequently, there is a growing need to develop effective experimental setups for testing these algorithms. Therefore, in academia and in industry, floating platforms have been developed and frequently used by many institutions to emulate orbital robotics scenarios.”

Raspberry Pi helps control the platform and communicates with other robots

Where does Raspberry Pi come in with this scenario? Its small size, low cost, and huge support and compatibility — along with ROS (Robotics Operating System) being available to use with Raspberry Pi — allow it to perform a great many functions for a project like this. Image processing, data analysis, control algorithms, wireless connectivity, and more make Raspberry Pi ideal for prototyping, then embedding in, systems like this.

Some light construction

The system works, to put it reductively, like an air hockey table. The floating platforms have an ‘air-bearing’ that levitates them off the floor a little like a hovercraft, and they have a series of nozzles that grant 3 DoF (degrees of freedom) — they can move along the X and Y axes, and rotate around the Z axis. For this to work, the platform needs to be light.

A visualisation of the robots working together in experiments

“The floating platform is constructed using additive manufacturing with lightweight carbon-fibre material, which helps extend experiment duration, allowing for the emulation of complex scenarios in the Zero-G Lab,” Barış explains. “The lighter the floating platform, the less compressed air it consumes. Moreover, the floating platform features a modular design, allowing easy disassembly of the middle and upper plates, which can also serve to carry equipment for various emulation scenarios. Its string-like topology provides ample space for mounting multiple components. 3D-printed supports can be easily integrated into the string structure, enabling the assembly of additional equipment such as debris removal systems, debris mock-ups, refuelling or docking mock-ups, sensors, and more. Each plate has a 60 cm diameter, and the distance between them is adjustable, offering flexibility for accommodating different types of equipment, making the platform highly versatile for various applications.”

Lift-off

The good news is that the floating platform works as expected.

The laboratory where the experiments and tests are carried out

“From the numerical results gathered during the experiments, we confirmed that the proposed floating platform used with Raspberry Pi is suitable for emulating on-orbit scenarios,” Barış reveals. “The floating platform of Zero-G Lab is successfully performing SIL (software-in-the-loop) and HIL (hardware-in-the-loop) capabilities. Several mission-specific proof-of-concept tests — such as rendezvous and docking, on-orbit interaction, landing, etc. — that leverage the floating platforms in the Zero-G Lab have been realised.”

Maybe a Raspberry Pi–powered robot will be tested on here for a future mission? Only time will tell. 

Quick facts

• Parts of the design are patented
• The platforms communicate with the rest of the lab’s robotics
• Communication is handled via ROS
• Solenoid valves manage the pressure, to a max of 10 bar
• A pressure regulator helps control the external compressed air source  

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