Weekly Digest 10 – 16 | DIY Cameras, Edge AI & Matrix Displays
Welcome back to this weeks news and projects by PiShop Africa, where we realise it’s not actually a weekly schedule but we try to anyway. Whether your micro-soldering, fine-tuning SLA vats or deploying AI models on single-board computers, we’ve got some exciting projects and newsclips from custom hardware builds to edge AI that’ll inspire your next weekend build!
Featured News & Guides
On the official Raspberry Pi Blog, Naush Patuck highlights a major advancement in local machine learning. Thanks to recent optimizations by engineers at Google and Igalia, Google’s LiteRT (formerly TensorFlow Lite) and the Gemma open-weight model family now run efficiently on the Raspberry Pi 5.
The post demonstrates how running LiteRT-LM alongside Gemma 4 E2B on a Raspberry Pi 5 can power complex, low-latency applications—like the Reachy Mini social robot—entirely offline with zero cloud dependencies. With generation speeds reaching ~27.3 characters per second and peak memory under 1.5 GB, local vision, speech, and reasoning models are more accessible than ever. GPU acceleration via LiteRT’s WebGPU/Vulkan backend is also supported, allowing developers to offload continuous computer vision (like YOLO object detection) to the VideoCore VII GPU while leaving CPU cores free for reasoning pipelines.
Featured Projects
CM5 DIY Streat Photography Camera
Yes we’re back into doom scrolling again but it did lead to seeing some fantastically beautiful projects on r/raspberry_pi. Especially this one by New-Concentrate6308, who shared their custom mirrorless-style digital camera built using the Compute Module 5.
Designed over six months to replicate commercial camera functionality, the build features a 1-inch Sony IMX283 image sensor (via a OneInchEye board) housed in a 3D-printed body. What sets this project apart is its software pipeline: it uses the CM5’s GPU via DMA shaders to apply real-time film simulation algorithms directly to straight-out-of-camera JPEGs. New-Concentrate6308 tested the camera on a trip to Stockholm, capturing high-quality street photography without needing post-processing edits.
64x64 Raspberry Pi Spotify Matrix Display v3
Also on r/raspberry_pi, maker gonnabuysomewindows unveiled version 3 of their popular 64×64 RGB LED Matrix Spotify Display, powered by a Raspberry Pi 3B+.
Building on previous iterations, v3 simplifies the installation process with Makefiles while adding rich new features, including animated album art transitions, synchronized lyrics, and playback metadata. Driven by Python and the spotify library, the project includes an emulator that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux so makers can preview the display layout before wiring up physical LED panels.
Curiously Minty: Raspberry Pi Zero Altoids Cyberdeck
On the Raspberry Pi Blog, writer Andrew Gregory showcases a clever build by maker Exercising Ingenuity (Mason), who managed to pack an entire portable Linux workstation into an iconic Altoids mint tin.
The build features a Raspberry Pi Zero, a custom dot-matrix keyboard driven by a Waveshare RP2040 Zero controller, a UPS HAT with battery, a 2-inch LCD display, and a tiny USB hub for peripheral connectivity. Mason stripped down unnecessary ports and direct-soldered components to save space inside the tin, while designing a custom flex-filament 3D-printed bracket to hold the components securely against the rounded tin walls. With 15 GPIO pins broken out and labeled on the tin’s exterior, it serves as a fully functional, ultra-portable field terminal.
Getting Back Into Resin Printing: First Impressions
On Hackaday, May Posch has shared an in-depth. hands-on comparison between FDM and MSLA printing workflows for anybody trying to figure out which direction their heading to.
Maya highlights how far resin printing resolution has come, capturing fine details at 0.1 mm layer heights that FDM simply obliterates. The article candidly covers the pros and cons of modern printer ecosystems: comparing network file transfers over SMB and local USB ports against restrictive cloud slicer APIs, while weighing resin’s superior dimensional accuracy against the realities of active carbon filtering, IPA wash stations, and UV water-bath curing.
Our Binge-Watch of the Week
This weeks must-watch videos are pretty much gaming centered and one which is on PiShop Africa wishlist of projects.
I Built The Console Microsoft Never Will by The Stock Pot
You’ve seen us build our own RFID gaming system but we didn’t really take it as far as The Stock Pot took it, essentially creating his very own gaming system instead of a script and RFID sensor. By taking apart a mini-pc and attach that aforementioned RFID system, he’s created a nostalgic yet functional gaming system. Our favourite part has to be the case design, a sleek industrial military design that could definitely fit in our warehouse… if we had a gaming corner.
A Raspberry Pi can revive a dead PSP with this mod
In this video Jeff Greeling goes over putting together a first-gen PSP with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. It’s essentially a retro emulator setup with a PSP shell, but we love it regardless. It does come with some slight over-heating and could definitely also run on a Raspberry Pi Zero but you’ll be hard pressed to find boards as slim as the compute modules.
DIY Flight Simulator Joystick
And on our wishlist of projects has to be this DIY Flight Simulator Joystick created by Tom Stanton. We’ve been on a roll lately trying to create our own Gaming peripherals but we haven’t made anything that tops this and it’s definitely in our wishlist right after we finished the racing sim pedals. If only those bearings could get here quicker. Regardless, we like the idea of using hall effect sensors but hate the idea of the project costing more than the origional project so we were quite intrigued when he pulled out those tiny hall effect sensors!
Conclusion
That’s a wrap for this weeks projects and news, I as in Christopher particularly love the gaming controllers and equipment I’ve been seeing lately and can’t wait to create my own rendition of them.
Did we miss any cool projects or if you posted one yourself, please let us know in the comments below! We’d love to hear more about it and would love to share info on it as well!
