Build a home recording studio with Raspberry Pi 500: choosing your equipment

Here’s what you need to know to equip your new studio, from micro to medium budgets. This is the second stage of a multi-part tutorial from Raspberry Pi Official Magazine; if you’d like to follow along, skip back to the first part, about setting up your recording space, to get started.

Following on from our guide to setting up an acoustically treated recording space at home, it’s time to get to the hardware. Quieter than an actively cooled Raspberry Pi 5 setup in most cases, Raspberry Pi 500 is a great studio computer (other Raspberry Pi 4, 400, and 5 models also work well, if you use a silent case or no fan), but you’ll need a little more equipment than that.

A basic voice recording setup could include a USB condenser mic, studio monitors, and headphones

Audio interfaces

You’ll need an external audio device. For basic voice recording, we’ve successfully used a pocket-sized consumer USB DAC (AudioQuest DragonFly Red, £135) and a USB microphone. This is enough, with the right software and driver setup, to handle vocal and spoken word recording, editing, and mixing without any quality or latency issues.

More sophisticated productions require more gear. A guitar can also be connected via a USB guitar lead, and USB XLR microphone leads are also available. These generic devices are available from brands including t.bone, Lindy, and Behringer for around £13, and they’re functionally interchangeable. If you have a condenser mic that requires 48 V phantom power, you’ll need an additional power unit.

Raspberry Pi 500’s three USB ports are sufficient to connect both an audio capture device and a DAC, but if you have multiple instruments to connect, a more sophisticated audio interface makes sense and saves ports

This is a point in favour of dedicated audio interfaces, such as the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (£159), currently in its 4th generation, which has two powered XLR inputs, two TRS or TS inputs, a stereo pair of TRS outputs, a TRS headphone port, and can record two live inputs at once. You can save money by getting an older model, and even those with software controls are supported thanks to a Linux driver project. Other good entry-level audio production interfaces are made by Behringer, Presonus, Steinberg, and Roland.

Instruments

Assuming you already have the instruments you play, you’ll mostly need to consider either mic’ing up acoustic instruments or making sure you have an interface with the right connectors for your electric instruments.

If you primarily compose using MIDI step entry and plan on mostly working with loops or in your DAW’s notation or piano roll interface, you don’t necessarily need any instruments, although a MIDI keyboard can come in handy. We opted for a lightly weighted, 49-key Novation Launchkey 49 Mk4 (£222), designed for use as a DAW controller. MIDI instruments can be connected via integrated USB, Wireless USB, or traditional MIDI ports assuming your audio interface has them – our Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 doesn’t, so we used USB.

Make sure that you have enough space for any instruments you need, add floor- or wall-mounted instrument stands as required, and ensure that your audio interface is equipped to handle them. 

If you just need to connect a single guitar or bass, generic USB interfaces are conspicuously cheap and work well

Microphones

Dynamic microphones use a magnetic coil to pick up sound, while condenser mics use a lighter, thus more sensitive, electrostatically charged diaphragm. Dynamic mics are robust, highly directional, and well suited to the rigours of a stage environment. They’re not favoured for studio use, as they’re less sensitive to sound than condenser mics and have a narrower frequency response. But if you frequently have background noise in your environment, the reduced sensitivity of a good-quality dynamic mic could result in a better-sounding overall recording. We use a Shure SM-58 for vocals and SM-57 for mic’ing amps and instruments, as these live workhorses sound great and border on indestructible.

For vocal work in a sound-treated room, we strongly recommend a more responsive large-diaphragm condenser mic, connected via either USB or XLR. Entry-level favourites include the Audio Technica AT2020 XLR mic (£75), Logitech’s Blue Yeti USB/XLR mic (£120), and the Rode NT-1 XLR mic (£135 including shock mount).

We’re using a desk mic here with a solid stand with a heavy anti-vibration base, plus a mic cover

Headphones

Headphones allow you to monitor – i.e. listen to – whatever you’re recording and let you listen to previously recorded parts that you’re trying to accompany. Closed-back studio headphones won’t leak sound for live mics to accidentally pick up their sound. 

We used Adam Audio H200 headphones (£135) for this. Shure’s SRH440s are a little cheaper, and also good for the job. However, you can use whatever you happen to have, as long as they don’t leak noise and have a fairly neutral sound profile. So if you have a favourite pair of sound-isolating earbuds, they’ll do perfectly well if you don’t want to shell out for new cans straight away. 

Avoid the kind of open-backed cans that are aimed at hi-fi enthusiasts (these tend to have a great soundstage but least sound) and on-ear headphones.

Studio monitors

Eventually you’ll also want studio monitors: speakers with a neutral audio profile designed to make the job of mixing music easier – no bass boosts or hi-fi EQ tweaking.

We’re using Adam Audio TV5 (£135 per powered speaker – £270 for two), which are about as big as our desk will comfortably hold, measuring 290 × 180 × 270 mm. These are near-field monitors, designed to accurately reproduce the full frequency spectrum of your music at a low volume, close to your head, so you don’t need to blast your ears apart.

We’ve also run with larger monitors: Behringer’s Truth B2030A monitors (£281 for a pair) are much larger powered loudspeakers, measuring 317 × 214 × 211 mm. Their sound is a little less precise than the Adams, but is still appropriately neutral at low volumes and is a solid choice if you’re working in a larger space.

If you’re on a budget, Mackie’s compact CR5-X speakers (£159) fall between computer speakers and monitors, and are reasonable choice for the money if you’re not doing high-precision work.

Other equipment

To go with your microphone, you’ll need a mic stand or boom arm. Options include desktop mic stands, booms with screw clamps to hold them to the edge of your table, ceiling-mounted booms, and a variety of floor-standing mic stands. Most condenser mics are threaded, but you’ll need a microphone clip to attach to the stand if you’re working with a traditional dynamic stage mic, while condenser mics will benefit from shock mounts.

Another consideration for your mic is a pop shield or cover to soften plosives (hard consonants such as p, k, and t).

And last but certainly not least, you’ll need the appropriate cables – there’s nothing more frustrating than buying cool new gear that you can’t use – and any relevant adapters, such as 3.5 mm to 1/4-inch TRS stereo adapters for headphones, if yours don’t come with one.

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Harnessing RP2040 for microgravity research in zero-g parabolic flight

Last year, engineer Christian Wenzel-Benner and researcher Dr. Michaela Dümmer from Prof. Dr. Christoph Forreiter‘s research group exploring plant behaviour in microgravity got in touch. The team’s experiments demand a high degree of automation, actuation, and sensing, and they had found RP2040 to be a low-cost solution ideally suited to the task. They wondered if we’d be interested in learning more; naturally, we were! Below, Christian and Michaela share the challenges of their work and how Raspberry Pi hardware helped to tackle them.

On a sunny Sunday morning in 2024 a group of scientists headed from Marburg, Germany, to Bordeaux, France, to carry out experiments in weightlessness on a parabolic flight campaign supported by DLR (German Aerospace Center)/BMWi funded project 50BW2134. The van was packed to the rafters with luggage and equipment, and we had thirteen hours of driving ahead, almost without any break. The roads seemed endless, but finally we reached the military area of the Bordeaux–Mérignac Airport, home base of the Airbus A310 Zero-G waiting for its take-off.

Roughly a year previously it had been very much in doubt that this day would actually come. The heavy and expensive equipment we’d inherited from other scientists was becoming unreliable, and development licences had lapsed. Licence renewal was out of budget, and some vital replacement equipment seemed to be made from pure unobtainium. This would be the flight that had to go right, but massive g-forces, stringent safety requirements, and the constant danger of a scientist-operator becoming incapacitated were among the long list of challenges facing this very unique experiment. Reliability was mandatory; money and development time were limited.

Brooding over the options, the group’s engineer had a crazy idea: what if we could replace all the problematic, unobtainable, heavy and costly components with something like a Raspberry Pi Pico and a custom printed circuit board? A fully integrated measurement and detection device – MD-Device for short. Crazy! But if it worked, it would get us to France, where, after a hard week of preparing and testing, the real fun would begin.

The researchers’ MD-Device in front of the equipment it replaces

The real fun: that is to say, week two – the flying week. The first parabola is always the most exciting: strapped to the ground next to your experiment you eagerly await the “pull-up” announcement, when the engines boost the aircraft straight into the sky, almost stalling, at an angle of about 50° for about 20 seconds. Subjected to 1.8 g, twice the normal g-force, you are pressed against the floor. You can barely move until the loudspeaker says: “Injection!”. After a short transition you encounter 22 seconds of weightlessness. All weight drops away, and you start to float from the floor. What a feeling! Of course, you are not allowed to float around uncontrolled or freely and, of course, you are busy with supervising your experiment, while the plane goes over the top, nosedives, and heads for the ocean below. After 22 seconds of weightlessness the plane pulled out of the dive, exposing us to 1.8 g again. We experienced this 31 times on each flight, on three consecutive flight days. Exhausting, but an incredible, exciting experience!

Our experimental “pets” were young, green plant seedlings, and our goal was to analyse the physiological response of plants to altered gravity. We were therefore investigating the distribution of calcium ions in plants that had been genetically modified to make them capable of emitting light (luminescence) after calcium binding. Light emission was detected by a photon multiplier tube and the output pulses were counted. To achieve this, we had conducted earlier ground-based experiments using an inherited industry-standard test, measurement and control system. Digital I/O, motor control, and automation of the experiments’ control flow were all handled within this digital ecosystem. But the licences had lapsed and replacement parts were hard to get. The switch to an RP2040-based MD-Device, originally a course of action in which the group had little choice, turned out to be the gift that kept on giving.

Detailed view of the final MD-Device: RP2040 in the centre, SD card interface and accelerometer at the bottom, PMT signal input on the left

Experiments under weightlessness require a much more sophisticated approach than ground experiments: every experimental process needs to be automated and synchronised with the detection unit, since experimenters have only limited access to the samples during zero-g. The MD-Devices handled all that automation. To avoid a single point of failure we built four complete setups (called Lumiboxes), each controlled by an MD-Device. Two Lumiboxes went into a heavy-duty metal box (called a “Rack”), each with an independent power supply, control laptop, and scientist-operator. Since each RP2040 sends the data to the control laptop as well as a local SD card, this provides 2×2×2 redundancy. It worked like a charm. Every Lumibox, every MD-Device performed flawlessly over the three days. We obtained both redundant and diverse experimental data at a volume and quality that our inherited equipment would never have produced.

Prof. Forreiter floating in zero-g in front of a Rack containing two MD-Devices in operation; the laptop shows the control interface written in Python

RP2040 was instrumental to this success in more than one way. The MD-Device monitors g-forces, controls a stepper motor, and logs light pulses – redundantly. Those core functions are tied together by an experiment control flow sequence written on a PC (for science) but executed independently on the MD-Device (for redundancy) in case the USB cable to the PC should become unplugged at 1.8x normal gravity. We needed USB: RP2040 has it. We needed to count pulses up to 55MHz: RP2040’s PWM is good for 62.5Mhz at stock speed. We needed a gravity sensor: RP2040 boards by Adafruit and a matching helper board provided that, as well as a way to back up data to SD cards. All of that is quite a bit of software, hard to develop and to run fast enough. The Raspberry Pi Pico C/C++ SDK sped up development, and the dual-core RP2040 provided the execution speed. But before we could go on board, everything needed to be tested under realistic conditions.

Our task was to generate a repeatable photon emission test that triggers reliably on a specific gravity vector change and fits into a petri dish (diameter 10cm) suspended vertically in a sealed dark chamber. That feat takes either divine intervention or an RP2040 microcontroller board hooked up to an accelerometer IC and a small battery. The result was “LumiBerry”, a CircuitPython-based synthetic plant. It served us quite well during the developmental phase, allowing us to test automation approaches without real plants and ridiculously expensive luminescent chemicals.

Michaela Dümmer holding two “LumiBerry” plant emission simulators: NiMH-based on the left, LiPo-based on the right. Accelerometers hidden behind.

But where on earth could we try out our experiment setup in weightlessness? The answer was at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen. They can provide 2–9 seconds of weightlessness in the Bremen Drop Tower and the GraviTower Bremen Pro. This allowed us to successfully test the MD-Devices under real (but brief) conditions of weightlessness at the end of 2023, to prepare for boarding the aircraft the following year.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Forreister talks about the group’s research on plant physiology in microgravity and how ZARM’s drop towers helped their work

The people at ZARM were supremely helpful, and we consider their slogan “test before flight” to be spot-on advice for zero-g experiments. Anyone interested in the ZARM facility should check out Tom Scott’s excellent video about the Bremen Drop Tower.

Left: experiment capsule preparation at ZARM in November 2023; right: Michaela Dümmer in front of the GraviTower Bremen Pro before the capsule is loaded

RP2040 transformed a large, heavy, expensive setup into efficient equipment for our experiments in weightlessness, enabling us to take our work on a parabolic zero-g flight and then return to Bremen to carry out further experiments in November 2024.

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How to build a Raspberry Pi 500 home recording studio: setting up your space

Silent and powerful, Raspberry Pi 500 is a perfect recording studio computer. In the first part of this series from Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, we’ll set up a budget-conscious sound-absorbing recording space for vocal and simple instrument recording; next week we’ll bring you part 2, on the equipment you can use to kit it out.

This feature focuses on voice recording and very basic instrument recording – if you need to record a full band on a regular basis, you’re looking at a more involved studio setup with a full room which should lean into techniques like building rockwool panels and bass traps. A garage is both the stereotypical rehearsal and recording space, and a good choice. But if, like us, you don’t have an unused indoor garage going spare, you can turn a wide variety of small spaces into studio environments. We equipped a small nook in a converted loft space next to a flight of stairs.

You don’t have to use purpose-made acoustic materials – hanging curtains can greatly improve the sound reflectivity of hard surfaces

What you’ll need

• 30×30×5 cm acoustic foam tiles
• 3M VHB 5952 foam tape
• Scissors, scalpel, cutting board

Warning: Only use craft knives to cut tiles or peel off tape backing if you’re steady-handed and comfortable with doing so.

01. Find a space

In principle, when recording voice or acoustic instruments through a free-standing mic, you don’t want to be too near a wall, and you should especially avoid corners. However, the realities of DIY recording spaces that can be created within your average home means that you’ll have to make compromises regarding both what kind of acoustic modifications are practical and permitted to make. You’ll want a space that’s as isolated as possible from external sources of sound, ideally without windows. Pay particular attention to surfaces directly in front of your mics and to the corners of the room. These are where your sound-absorbing material will make the greatest difference.

02. Furniture & gear

You want to work out what furniture and – to a certain extent – equipment is going into place before you start soundproofing. This both allows you to ensure that your furniture will still fit after soundproofing, and that you can soundproof the right spaces. Consider issues that might affect your acoustics and your requirements. Will you primarily be recording voice, or will instruments come into play? What kind of desk and instrument or equipment racks will you have? Will your mic be on a boom arm or on a stand on your desk? Where will you be sitting or standing when you record your voice? What computer equipment will be in place and how much noise does it make? 

03. Assess hard surfaces

Radiators can produce ringing echoes. Because we also like being warm, we covered ours with a fleece blanket for easy removal

In our future studio space, a cupboard-lined storage area under a roof, the main reflective surfaces were a hard wall right in front of us, built-in wooden shelves on the left, the wood-surfaced sloped interior ceiling of a pitched roof, and a metal radiator on one wall. In our case, the essential thing to soundproof was the wall right in front of our mic, a hard surface that reflects our voice straight back into the microphone. This alone dramatically improved the quality of our voice recordings, and, in the right space, is a minimum viable acoustic setup. 

04. How to mount acoustic foam

If you have walls that reflect sound back into your microphones, which you almost certainly do, you’ll need to soften those surfaces. The easiest way to do this is to use acoustic foam, also known as ‘eggbox foam’. It’s available in sheets, rolls, and tiles. We opted for the latter to add basic acoustic absorption to our walls, largely because it’s easy to fit. Budget eggbox foam tiles usually come vacuum-compressed and can take anywhere from a couple of days to over a week to return to shape. Once they have, apply thick double-sided tape – 3M’s 1.1 mm thick VHB 5952 foam tape is ideal for this. For application to our papered and painted partition wall, 2 cm strips in each corner worked well, but you’ll need more tape for other kinds of surfaces. 

05. Take the corner

Pay special attention to corners where walls and ceilings join, as sound bounces between these hard surfaces, creating more unwanted echoes than a flat wall. 

Pay special attention to corners and joins between hard surfaces when placing acoustic-dampening materials

If, like us, you’re dealing with irregular, angled spaces, you can cut acoustic foam tiles along the diagonal to meet at the corner and into other shapes to fill inconveniently placed gaps. Note that if you’re going to be sticking tiles upside down or along inverted inclines, such as ceilings beneath a roof, then you’ll need to run longer strips of foam tape along them to ensure good adhesion. 

06. Alternative materials: rockwool

Acoustic-specific spun fibreglass insulation – most ubiquitously made by rockwool – is another popular material for acoustic absorption. It’s very cheap, and while acoustic foam mostly absorbs high frequencies, rockwool will also reduce unwanted mid-range and bass frequencies.

VHB 5952 tape is amazing, but it’s so adhesive that its own backing can be hard to get off. We used a scalpel blade to peel up one corner of the plastic backing

However, it’s a skin irritant and obnoxious to work with – you’ll want to wear gloves and a mask. If you install rockwool, you’ll need to cover it with something to keep it from shedding, and it’s also heavier and more challenging to install. Mounting it on wood or making panels to stuff it into is a popular choice, but will require you to drill into your walls, which isn’t always an option in rented accommodation.

07. Panels and air gaps

Professional studio installations often use acoustic panels suspended from the ceilings and walls. That’s a bit much for DIY, but if you’ve got a large enough space – if you’re converting a garage or have an entire room, for example – then free-standing or air-gapped wall-mounted acoustic panels are an outstanding choice. While you ideally want an air gap behind your panel roughly equal to its width, for a home installation this is far less of a concern than simply having acoustic panels at all. If you have woodworking tools and skill, you can build a box, fill it with rockwool, and cover it with fine mesh screen material. However, acoustic screen panels are also an option, whether you DIY them or buy pre-made ones. You’ll find these sold as office furniture as often as you’ll see them described as recording studio gear, and if you can find some being sold off cheaply as furniture, they’re worth considering. 

08. Irregular surfaces

Although purpose-made equipment is great, you can dramatically improve excessive sound reflection by hanging curtains on walls and cupboards. Acoustic fabric is best, but at around £20 per metre, you might prefer to see if you can acquire heavy standard curtains made of velvet, fleece, or similar textiles. Favour fabrics that you can’t easily breathe through – anything dense enough to make this difficult can also reflect sound. We used a fur fabric curtain on a built-in cupboard, and an old fleece on an inconveniently located radiator – some people use towels on radiators, and these can ring in response to high-frequency sounds. 

Make particularly sure to add foam to corners – here, we’ve applied acoustic foam to the join between a wall and low ceiling

09. Flooring

You’ll hear a surprising amount of online debate about how you should approach flooring in a recording environment, with some people suggesting thick carpeting, but the general consensus is that hard floors such as sealed concrete are best. In our budget DIY setup, we found our wooden second-story floor covered with laminate flooring to be absolutely fine, particularly for voice recording and isolated guitars rather than a full band. If you’re going to be recording at a table, it’s genuinely not a major issue. 

10. Bass traps

If you are going to be recording instruments – particularly drums, acoustic instruments, or miked-up speakers – then you might want to get into more DIY construction by making bass traps for the corners of your space, as an alternative to buying expensive pre-made ones. You’ll need to build a box at right angles to fit into a corner, stuffing it with rockwool and covering it with strong mesh. For a room-scale studio build, it’s recommended that you stack these from floor to ceiling in each corner, although this isn’t necessarily something you’ll need for a smaller setup. See this DIY bass trap guide from Mastering.com for an example of construction methods. 

We’ll cover equipment in the next instalment of this guide, but quieter is better, which is why we’ve chosen Raspberry Pi 500 as our studio PC

11. If you can’t build a studio

Recording in your car, already a soundproof space, can be a great stopgap or on-the-road solution if you’re using a portable recorder to make a podcast, but it doesn’t lend itself to a full studio setup.

Also popular is the blanket fort setup, the most bare-bones version of which is a duvet over your head and a sock over your phone’s mic to act as a pop filter. Some podcasters swear by dragging a fleece blanket over both themselves and a USB mic. However, many people find this to be hot, claustrophobic and unpleasant, and it doesn’t work too well for a lot of hardware configurations. 

12. Portable acoustic optimisation equipment

If you don’t have space or permission to start putting up acoustic foam tiles or the tools to build movable rockwool-stuffed boxes, you can buy dedicated acoustic absorption screens that’ll fit most mics and can in turn be mounted on a mic stand, which have come down to around £60 in recent years; for instance, t.bone’s Micscreen range. You can also pick up clones for around £30 or potentially DIY something using acoustic foam if you’re handy – we’ve seen builds using spray or hot glue and everything from old ring binders to cardboard or plastic storage crates to mount your foam on.

It took £36 of tiles, £8 of tape, a £5 table from a charity shop, an old curtain, and a fluffy fleece blanket to produce an adequate voice recording studio space for just under £50

Check back next week for the next part of this series, where we’ll take you through choosing equipment to kit out the space you’ve set up.

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Raspberry Pi 45W USB-C Power Supply on sale now at $15

Whether you’re running a Raspberry Pi or charging a laptop, the quality of your power supply makes all the difference. Today, we’re excited to introduce our best power supply yet, perfect for either task: the $15 Raspberry Pi 45W USB-C Power Supply.

Efficient regulation

Every Raspberry Pi single-board computer we’ve ever sold needs flash storage and a power supply. And not just any flash storage or power supply: buying the cheapest SD card or USB wall wart you can find on Amazon is a guaranteed way to have a bad experience.

So over time, we started to regulate the accessories offered by our Approved Resellers. We would test resellers’ SD cards, to ensure that they had sufficient random-access performance and were resilient against thousands of unplanned power loss events. Last year, we took this to the next level, launching Raspberry Pi-branded A2-class SD cards and NVMe SSDs, which are now the only storage options promoted alongside our computers.

Torturing SD cards

Similarly, Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 were accompanied at launch by 15.3W and 27W USB-C power supplies. Dominic worked with our ODM partner KTEC and capacitor vendor Panasonic to validate that the design of these products met our aggressive goals for transient response and product lifetime. In the case of the 27W power supply, we added a custom 5.1V, 5A operating mode to give Raspberry Pi 5 headroom to pass an aggregate 1.6A downstream to power-hungry peripherals.

Power for everyone, power for everything

When you build really high-quality generic products, like USB power supplies and SD cards, interesting things happen. Our colleague Oli tells a story of seeing customers at a Micro Center in North Carolina come up to the Raspberry Pi display and buy just our 27W power supply on its own: in building the best USB-C power supply for our customers, we’d accidentally built the best USB-C power supply for everyone.

I can certainly relate to this – every USB device in my house is powered by a Raspberry Pi power supply. But 27W is just a little bit too weedy to rapidly charge my laptop, and so the idea of an upgraded design was born: even better electronics, in (almost) the same form factor, with a longer (1.5m versus 1.2m) cable and a suite of new 45W operating modes, including 20V, 2.25A.

The new 20V mode in action

All this is available for just $15, compared to $12 for the 27W version. Raspberry Pi users won’t notice a difference: you’ll still get 5.1V, 3A on a Raspberry Pi 4, or 5.1V, 5A on a Raspberry Pi 5. But for everything else, perhaps you’ve just found your new favourite power supply. Check out our new 45W power supply today and order from your favourite Approved Reseller.

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Stay on schedule with Raspberry Pi Pico W and an e-ink dashboard

The vibrant community and commercial ecosystem around Raspberry Pi helps people to bring their ideas to life. Here, student Jaeheon Shim uses a Raspberry Pi Pico W–powered e-ink display from one of our Approved Resellers to help him focus and stay on track with the demands of a packed timetable.

If you’ve got a busy schedule, then it’s all too easy to become overwhelmed. Without a good system in place, you’ll find deadlines slip, appointments are missed, and you’re constantly playing catch-up. It’s why there are so many calendar and task management apps on the market and, crucially, why Jaeheon Shim decided to take his scheduling to another level.

The Inky Dashboard uses Pimoroni’s 7.3-inch e-ink Inky Frame, which supports seven colours

“As a student, staying organised is crucial for keeping up with the demands of college life,” he says. “I found myself relying on productivity apps like Google Calendar, Todoist, and Notion, but they weren’t enough. Instead, I wanted my calendar to be physically present at my workspace, updating in real time to accommodate last-minute events. I also wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing — something that would perfectly complement my workspace while being as informative as possible.”

Task master

To that end, Jaeheon devised the Inky Dashboard — effectively an e-ink display connected to a Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller running a bespoke UI. “I think e-ink displays are awesome. There’s just something about their crisp, paper-like quality that makes them so uniquely satisfying to look at,” he says. “I also wanted something that could sit on my desk without being a distraction; something that I could occasionally glance at but was otherwise running quietly in the background.”

At its core, Jaeheon wanted a week-by-week calendar, where daily events would be laid out in a chronological column. “That way, I could visualise my week ‘at a glance’ and mentally prepare for the upcoming days of the week,” he says, deciding to integrate his data from iCal. 

But when he later opted to integrate tasks from the Todoist app as well, to help him stay on top of his assignments and projects, he knew that he needed to compromise. “I had to shrink the calendar to only two days wide to make space for the to-do list, but in my experience, being able to see today and tomorrow is enough for almost all purposes,” he adds. 

A Raspberry Pi Pico W is already surface-mounted to the back of the display; this project is all about the software

Quick FACTS

• The dashboard remains in a low-power state
• It’s woken up by Raspberry Pi Pico’s on-board real-time clock
• Data is drawn from a custom server
• It will update every 30 minutes or so
• The project is entirely open source

To-do list

Working with a Raspberry Pi Pico W presented a learning curve for Jaeheon. “I’d never seriously worked with embedded programming before,” he says. It took numerous attempts to create the UI he wanted, having tried libraries provided by Pimoroni and developing his own UI library. “Ultimately, I ended up settling on Light and Versatile Graphics Library (LVGL), and it took about a week to figure out how to port LVGL to Pico and Pimoroni’s Inky Frame.”

In the process, he figured out how to lay out overlapping events — “that was a fun algorithm design challenge,” he says. He also needed to create a server to retrieve the latest information, since the Pico wasn’t powerful enough to fetch it on its own. But, because the microcontroller connects periodically (“no more than every 30 minutes or so”) and displays information on an e-ink screen, the project is power-efficient. It’s also rather flexible.

The dashboard displays iCal and Todoist, but it can also handle syncing with Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook

“The data displayed on the calendar is presented in an agnostic format by the server, so I can always choose to add different sources by editing the Python code on the server (which is way easier to work with than the C++ running the display!),” Jaeheon says. “There are also many more features I want to add, such as a widget to show a basic weather forecast. The possibilities are endless!”

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Raspberry Pi’s prestigious Green Economy Mark for sustainable practices

We’re proud that Raspberry Pi has been awarded the London Stock Exchange’s Green Economy Mark — an accolade recognising companies and funds listed on the exchange that generate at least 50% of their revenue from products and services that have a positive environmental impact.

This recognition, achieved at the time of our successful listing in 2024, highlights our dedication to energy-efficient computing and sustainable technology. Our low-power devices help reduce energy consumption in homes, businesses, and industrial and embedded applications, contributing to a lower-carbon future.

What is the Green Economy Mark?

The LSE’s Green Economy Mark is a world-first initiative that identifies companies actively driving the transition to a sustainable, low-carbon economy. By spotlighting green leaders, the mark helps investors back businesses that are driving a sustainable future, promoting the growth of the green economy as a whole.

With a combined market capitalisation of £172.8 billion as of 2024, the companies in this exclusive cohort represent some of the most forward-thinking businesses in the world. The value of Green Economy Mark stocks held by institutional investors has surged by 50% over the last five years.

Raspberry Pi’s green commitment

Earning this mark is more than just an honour; it’s a reflection of our long-standing commitment to sustainability. Here are some of the ways we’re making a difference:

• Energy-efficient computing: our products are designed to maximise performance while using minimal power, helping individuals and businesses reduce their energy footprint
• Product longevity: we prioritise durability and long-term software support, reducing electronic waste
• Sustainable manufacturing practices: we work closely with our manufacturing partners to improve efficiency and minimise waste
• Empowering green innovation: Raspberry Pi is at the heart of countless projects that support a greener future, from smart energy management to eco-friendly IoT solutions
• Reducing our carbon footprint: by designing compact, low-power devices and optimising our supply chain, we’re committed to lowering emissions across the lifecycle of our products
• Mitigating our carbon footprint: in 2025 we have introduced Raspberry Pi Carbon Removal Credits to enable customers to offset the manufacture, shipping, and disposal of our products

Read the case study on Raspberry Pi in the LSE’s 2024 report, The Green Economy Mark: five years of green growth, to learn more about our sustainability story.

Sustainability is at the core of what we do, and earning the LSE’s Green Economy Mark reinforces our mission to provide powerful, low-cost, and environmentally responsible computing solutions for all. This recognition cements Raspberry Pi’s position as a leader in sustainable technology: it not only strengthens our appeal to environmentally conscious investors, but also sets an example for other businesses, proving that innovation and sustainability can go hand in hand.

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Poetry on the line: a vintage phone brought to life with Raspberry Pi

When Théo Z V Champion visited a vintage market in London, he noticed that shoppers were rather intrigued by a rotary phone — the type that needed callers to choose a number by inserting their fingers into the relevant holes of a dial before turning the wheel in order to initiate a telephone call. It was disconnected, but that didn’t prevent many people — acting out of curiosity or feeling pangs of nostalgia — from lifting the handset and placing it against one of their ears.

No modifications were made to the housing, so it looks, to all intents and purposes, like an ordinary old-fashioned phone

In each case, they were met with silence. They’d place the handset back onto the base, inevitably smile, and turn their attention to another retro device. But what if they had been able to listen to a voice? Would they have engaged with the phone for longer and potentially gained something more from the experience? With that thought in mind, Théo acquired an old landline phone of his own — albeit a push-button type — and he got to work on retrofitting it with a speaker.

The concept was that, upon lifting the handset, the user would hear a voice reading out a poem and this, he explains, would indulge a burning passion to mix technology with art. “I believe technology and engineering are underrepresented in art, so I create pieces that use technology as both the medium and the message to reveal the invisible world of engineering around us — be they algorithms, communications/surveillance tech, artificial intelligence, the internet and so on.”

Listen up

Théo selected a vintage French Socotel S63 phone, opting for a model that was designed by the Centre national d’études des télécommunications in the 1980s as a standard-issue device for homes the length and breadth of France.

He then opened the housing and decided to make a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer the heart of his modernised device. Since Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W doesn’t have an on-board audio amp, he connected it to a pair of 3W amplifier chips (MAX98357A). “This would drive audio to the phone earpieces via I2S,” says Théo, who attached all of the components to a 3D-printed support and inserted it into the housing.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is connected to the two small 3W amps, and these components are housed in their own 3D-printed case, which is then secured inside the phone

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 felt like a perfect fit and not simply because it was small enough to squeeze into the relatively cramped space within the phone. “I needed the phone to have internet access over Wi-Fi and to be able to play audio,” he explains. “Being a software engineer, having a full Linux environment is also a blessing for me as opposed to more constrained environments such as ESP32, MicroPython, and so on. All the tools and packages I could think of are compatible with this single-board computer.”

Finding inspiration

With the components sorted out and a switch hook connected so that, upon lifting the phone’s handset, the Raspberry Pi would spring into action, Théo began to work on the software. He’d discovered the Poetry Foundation website, which contains large collection of poems, and was delighted to find that a good number of them included audio narrated by the author.

“I poked around the website code and was quickly able to find an open access to their database,” he recalls. “I was able to download all the audio poems, but there was one issue: the poems contained an intro/outro by the author.”

The phone has a cache of a few gigabytes of poems for use offline, while audio is streamed when online with the phone directly connecting to the internet using Raspberry Pi’s wireless LAN capabilities

Théo wanted the poem to sound like the poet was actually on the other side of the phone, not just a recording. “One of the main challenges was to clean up all the audio-narrated poems from their intro/outro to only have the actual poem play when the phone is picked up,” he says. “The solution involved transcribing all the poems and then using a large language model (LLM) to cut out irrelevant portions.”

AI for rhyme

To transcribe the audio poems, Théo used WhisperX, an advanced, fast automatic speech recognition model which is capable of transcribing audio with word-level timing. Building upon OpenAI’s Whisper model that has been trained on about 680,000 hours of diverse audio, it allowed Théo to get a handle on exactly when each word was spoken in an audio clip. He could then turn to Open AI’s LLM, GPT-4o-mini, to complete the next stage of the task.

“I passed the transcription into GPT-4o-mini, asking it to remove any intro/outro [material],” he explains. “I was left with a database of more than 3000 perfectly cut audio poems.” This method also meant that the device is ‘future-proof’, so to speak. “The database updates every day as new poems are uploaded to the Poetry Foundation website,” Théo reveals, and Whispering Wires is capable of playing them all.

Of course, there are some ethical questions surrounding this move: is it right to remove the credit from the beginning of the audio simply to gain a seamless experience? Théo has already considered this and he says all of the information about the poets and the names of the poems is being saved and organised in a database. He plans to create some way to show the credits when the phone plays the poem and he’s currently looking for a small enough display.

In the meantime, Théo has been working on making his project as authentic an experience as possible. Although sound comes out of both the handset speaker and an extra earpiece that allows two people to listen to the poems at the same time, Théo has ensured that the audio isn’t played with crystal-clear clarity but instead sounds just like the phones did when they were being used a few decades ago.

“To achieve the vintage phone audio quality, I researched what frequencies phones operated at back then and applied the same filter with code (300Hz to 3.4kHz band range at 8kHz sampling frequency) to get the authentic ‘phone grain’.” He’s also added a hang-up sound followed by a line-disconnect tone when a poem ends so that the listener has the feeling the poet has hung up. To that end, it’s shaped up well as a head-turning art piece and if the response from Théo’s YouTube video is anything to go by, it is certainly getting people talking.

Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #152 out NOW!

You can grab the latest issue right now from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, WHSmith, and other newsagents, including the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge. It’s also available from our online store, which ships around the world. And you can get a digital version via our app on Android or iOS.

You can also subscribe to the print version of our magazine. Not only do we deliver worldwide, but people who sign up to the six- or twelve-month print subscription get a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico W!

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Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector on sale now at $25

Way back in 2018 we launched Raspberry Pi 3B+, the first Raspberry Pi with Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) support. We’ve been shipping PoE-powered devices, with the occasional hiccup, ever since. And today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector, the perfect way to add PoE support to your existing network for just $25.

Power to the people

Many of our favourite Raspberry Pi applications, from garden webcams to industrial controllers, involve putting our products in out-of-the-way locations, where they act as a bridge between the network and the physical world. But the more out-of-the-way the location, the more challenging it is to get power.

PoE offers one solution to this problem, allowing you to send power from Power Sourcing Equipment (PSE) to a Powered Device (PD) over the same four-pair cabling used to carry Ethernet data. All Raspberry Pi SBCs since 2018 have been able to function as a PD, when equipped with an optional PoE or PoE+ HAT.

At the other end of the cable, there are two common types of PSE:

• A PoE switch combines the network switching and power sourcing functions into a single device.
• A midspan injector connects to a non-PoE switch, and injects power into the cable while passing through network data in both directions.

Developed with our friends at Microchip, the new Raspberry Pi PoE+ Injector is the perfect way to power your networked Raspberry Pi projects (and other PoE devices) if you’re not lucky enough to have a PoE switch. It supports both the IEEE 802.3af (PoE, 13W) and IEEE 802.11at (PoE+, 25W) standards, and mains voltages between 100V and 240V.

Very demure, very mindful

You’ll need to provide your own IEC mains lead. In the unlikely event that your house is not, like mine, overrun with the things, many of our Approved Reseller partners will be happy to sell you one.

Kettle lead: model’s own

Fighting the power

There is, you may have noticed, something missing. While Raspberry Pi 5 provides a 4-pin PoE power connector, our first-party PD accessory, the snappily-named Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT+ for Raspberry Pi 5, is missing in action. This promises to be our smallest, most efficient PD accessory, and is in the final stages of development, having absorbed a lot of Dominic’s attention and brainpower over the last couple of years. Watch this space!

While we always say we can’t wait to see what you do with any new product, we are actually pretty sure we know what you are going to do with this one. But we’re confident you’ll do it with style.

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Introducing rpi-image-gen: build highly customised Raspberry Pi software images

When it comes to software on Raspberry Pi devices, one size doesn’t always fit all. Raspberry Pi OS is ideal for many applications, but we recognise that it doesn’t suit every use case or deployment model, particularly in a product that has a specific purpose. If you’re building an embedded system or an industrial controller, you’ll need complete control over the software resident on the device, and home users may wish to build their own OS and have it pre-configured exactly the way they want. For developers and organisations that require a custom software image, a flexible and transparent build system is essential; to support these customers, we have created rpi-image-gen, a powerful new tool designed to put you in complete control of your Raspberry Pi images.

rpi-image-gen is an alternative to pi-gen, which is the tool we use to create and deploy the Raspberry Pi OS distribution. rpi-image-gen is designed to generate highly customised software images for Raspberry Pi devices, and offers a very granular level of control over file system construction and software image creation.

Why we created rpi-image-gen: a purpose-built solution for our customers

There are a number of community-maintained build systems which already exist and which support Raspberry Pi devices. These offer several customisation options and are used by many Raspberry Pi customers today, so you may be wondering why we decided to create our own. rpi-image-gen was most definitely not born out of a ‘not-invented-here’ mindset; there are valid reasons why our customers would benefit from a tool designed, from scratch, to provide the flexibility we know they need to deploy software on their products.

By supporting a build system that has the benefits of Raspberry Pi OS distribution packages, we have one set of sources to maintain, which means that when software gets improved or fixed in one place, it’s automatically made available everywhere. Consolidating around centralised package-based delivery of software and updates makes a lot of sense. In addition, being able to help reduce software build time, provide guaranteed ownership of support, and reuse standard methodologies to ensure authenticity of software were all of paramount importance, and among the reasons why we created a new home-grown build tool for Raspberry Pi devices.

How rpi-image-gen works: a new approach to building images

Similar to pi-gen, rpi-image-gen leverages the power, reliability, and trust of installing a Debian Linux system for the device. However, unlike pi-gen, rpi-image-gen introduces some new concepts which serve to dictate the build footprint and installation.

Specifying your image: profiles, image layouts, and config files

A profile is essentially a collection of descriptive layers which group together Debian packages and installation operations. These collections can be selectively picked and customised further, and form the foundation of the software image. The image layout describes how the output software binary image will be created and laid out on-disk for programming into the device, including the types of file systems, partition table entries, image formats, etc. A config file is a ‘top level’ text file, written in easy-to-understand .ini syntax, which defines the profile and image layout that rpi-image-gen uses to build the device image.

The config file is typically associated with the underlying device hardware and product, so it can specify applicable attributes accordingly: for example, defining the sizes of individual partition images to match the onboard eMMC size, or using a layout which uses particular mount options for file systems, fine tuning options exposed by lower levels, or selecting a specific Raspberry Pi device class to target. Likewise, different derivatives of config files can be used to tailor the installation to the product’s functional requirements. You could, for example, utilise a Bluetooth audio layer to pull in device support; or use a particular layer to add in a minimal Wayland desktop which runs in a kiosk mode, to install a default set of containers, to seed a default environment for distribution to third-party developers, and so on. There is no limit to the possibilities.

Example builds: custom images in action

There is a small number of examples in the tree which demonstrate different use cases of rpi-image-gen. All create bootable disk images and serve to illustrate how one might use rpi-image-gen to create a bespoke image for a particular purpose. The number of examples will grow over time and we welcome suggestions for new ones. Let’s pick two of them and take a closer look: slim and webkiosk. 

slim: create a small, lightweight image

slim is an incredibly simple illustration of how to create a lightweight image containing a small number of essential packages that will boot on your Raspberry Pi. This image alone is not incredibly useful, but it shows how a custom configuration can be created and built upon in order to keep the size of the file system minimal. A small number of layers are pulled in by the profile (e.g. Debian base, core utilities, Linux kernel, and boot firmware), then a Raspberry Pi OS–style disk image is created with some headroom to run apt update and install a few packages.

webkiosk: create an image that boots into a browser kiosk mode

webkiosk builds upon a profile that, once again, pulls in a minimal number of components. It then adds, via a custom hook, other packages which are needed to support running the Chromium web browser in kiosk mode under Wayland. This image auto-boots into the browser using a custom systemd service and runs it full-screen with VT switching disabled. The Wayland compositor used (Cage) is a single-instance compositor, which is ideal for deployments that need to prevent user intervention via keyboard or mouse; for example, users should not be able to switch out of one window and into another via standard keyboard shortcuts.

Install it onto an SD card using Raspberry Pi Imager; here’s one we made earlier

What you leave out is just as important as what you include: how to control both

As well as being able to configure the build and device image the way you want, it’s important to be able to exclude from the package-based installation things that would otherwise be installed as part of the profile. One way to do this is via dpkg options, which are supported by the tool underpinning rpi-image-gen. The mmdebstrap engine drives device file system creation, with bdebstrap above it providing a highly customisable framework and a descriptive textual representation of layers. A layer is written in YAML, which is human-readable and easy to understand. Excluding assets from a package install is as easy as using dpkg --path-exclude and/or --path-include options in YAML for the particular layer that is pulled in by the profile.

Security, trust, and compliance: what this means for our customers

Auditing software, and being able to generate a list of the security vulnerabilities of a deployed device, is critically important. A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) in a standardised format should be one of the output artefacts of any software build system. rpi-image-gen produces an SBOM for every build and provides output format customisation options to the user, allowing them to feed that into other systems — for example, to generate a list of CVEs. By providing an SBOM and tracking security vulnerabilities, you are helping to give consumers of your image confidence in the software deployed on their device. In the not-too-distant future, there will be legislative requirements in this area, and we believe Raspberry Pi is well placed in the industry to provide customers with what they need.

One advantage of creating anything from scratch is the ability to make it exactly the way you want — to own it and shape it over time. We like to think that we understand the needs of our customers well, and we try to put them at the forefront of a significant part of our software development effort. It’s important that customers can trust us to help them resolve their problems, and can rely on our support for their product deployment. We’re proud to offer them a Raspberry Pi-supported build system which generates auditable software for their products in a way that is flexible and efficient for their engineering teams to use.

Visit the rpi-image-gen GitHub repository to get started. There, you’ll find documentation and examples to guide you through creating custom Raspberry Pi images. We encourage you to explore the repository and provide feedback to help us improve the tool further.

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