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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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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