Best of Raspberry Pi — February 2026

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   Hacker News·7w

   How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

   A decade-long personal project building a family e-paper dashboard called Timeframe, evolving from a Magic Mirror LCD to jailbroken Kindles, then Visionect e-paper displays, and finally a 25.3" Boox Mira Pro with real-time updates. The system aggregates calendar, weather, and smart home data, with Home Assistant now serving as the primary data source. Key architectural decisions include removing the database and Redis from the Rails backend, using file-store caching, and a status-indicator design philosophy that only surfaces actionable information. The project remains a work-in-progress with hardware cost and distribution challenges still to solve.

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   Article

   Jeff Geerling·10w

   The first good Raspberry Pi Laptop

   The Argon40 ONE UP is a modular laptop built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, allowing easy hardware upgrades by swapping the CM5. Priced at $400 for the shell or $550 with an 8GB CM5 and NVMe SSD, it features solid build quality with aluminum construction, decent speakers, a 14" 1920x1200 display, and 7.5 hours of battery life. However, it lacks proper laptop features like sleep mode and native battery management, requiring Python scripts for basic functionality. At around $600 for a complete setup due to recent Pi price increases, it struggles to compete with similarly priced Intel or AMD laptops that offer better performance and native OS support. While the hardware is well-designed and achieves right-to-repair goals similar to Framework laptops, the value proposition is weak in the current market.

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   selfh.st·10w

   Self-Host Weekly (6 February 2026)

   This weekly newsletter covers self-hosting news including Jellyfin's official Samsung TV app release, Home Assistant's February update renaming add-ons to apps, Pushover's new webhook support, and Raspberry Pi price increases. Featured content includes Inkheart, a lightweight self-hosted PDF indexing library, plus community project updates, software releases, and video tutorials on various self-hosting topics.

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   Jeff Geerling·7w

   Upgrading my Open Source Pi Surveillance Server with Frigate

   Jeff Geerling upgrades his local, cloud-free home surveillance system using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 on the new Exaviz Cruiser carrier board, housed in a DeskPi prototype mini rack enclosure. The setup runs Frigate NVR with a Hailo 8 AI accelerator for object detection, two 4TB NAS drives in a RAID 1 array via mdadm, and leverages the Cruiser's built-in 8-port PoE+ switch for camera connectivity. Key hardware details include the PCIe/USB architecture trade-offs on the CM5, cooling challenges with the prototype enclosure, and software setup via an Ansible playbook. With three cameras (two 1080p, one 4K), CPU usage stayed under 5% and object detection ran at ~10ms, leaving plenty of headroom for more cameras.

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