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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

WB

24 alternatives to We built an appliance with Raspberry Pi that backs up from the cloud

http://picirus.com For Startup Weekend Tulsa, we created a small low-power appliance (built on Raspberry Pi) that you connect to your different cloud accounts -- Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, etc. -- and it downloads a copy of all your stuff every night. I was thinking about all the people I love who share directly to the cloud, without a lot of planning for the case where their Facebook account gets hacked, their Dropbox account has a glitch, or one of these services they love goes out of business suddenly some day. We had a ton of fun building Picirus during Startup Weekend. I highly…

Picirus is a Raspberry Pi-based appliance that automatically backs up content from cloud services like Facebook, Flickr, and Dropbox to local storage each night. Designed for people who store photos and files online… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. We built an appliance with Raspberry Pi that backs up from the cloud launched in 2012; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    A few months ago, I was inspired by this post on Reddit, titled: Food items should have QR codes that instruct the microwave exactly what to do. Like high for 2 minutes, let stand 1 minute, medium 1 minutes.. I thought this was a pretty cool idea, and that it

    2013 · madebynathan.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2BA

    Hi. I heard HN likes e-paper gadgets so I wanted to share a little side project I’ve been working on with @sqfmi. We’re building Beepberry - a portable e-paper computer for hackers, designed for chatting on Beeper. My day job is running Beeper [0], but I will always have a soft spot for building hardware. I wanted to create a ‘weekend’ device that would let me stay in touch with friends and family, without the distractions of a full smartphone. I imagined a tiny, hackable e-paper screen with a physical keyboard, powered by a Raspberry Pi, that I could use to chat around my home…and pretty…

    2023 · beepberry.sqfmi.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Using only a Raspberry Pi and an $11 video capture dongle, you can create your own KVM over IP device, allowing you to send keyboard input to a remote computer and capture its display.

    2020 · mtlynch.io · its alternatives →

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    Using the Raspberry Pi to water plants automatically

    2017 · mtlynch.io · its alternatives →

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    E-ink bird frame for Raspberry Pi - real-time bird detection by audio, fully local AI, rendered as real, hand-cut 1800s bird illustrations. - arnegiacomo/fugleramme

    Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Building a Bus Clock for my House using a Raspberry PI and Python. I won't miss the bus ever again!

    2022 · purplehoisin.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Make your home smart with Raspberry Pi

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    I've been hacking away lately, and I'm now proud to show off my newest project - The Icepi Zero! In case you don't know what an FPGA is, this phrase summarizes it perfectly: "FPGAs work like this. You don't tell them what to do, you tell them what to BE." You don't program them, but you rewrite the circuits they contain! So I've made a PCB that carries an ECP5 FPGA, and has a raspberry pi zero footprint. It also has a few improvements! Notably the 2 USB b ports are replaced with 3 USB C ports, and it has multiple LEDs. This board can output HDMI, read from a uSD, use a SDRAM and much more.…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Simple demo illustrating remanence of data in RAM (see Cold boot attack) using a Raspberry Pi. Loads many images of the Mona Lisa into RAM and recovers after powering off/on again. - anfractuosity/ramrecovery

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A global contest to grow and monitor your own food with Raspberry Pi - alexellis/growlab

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Turn a Raspberry Pi into your home cloud

    2024 · umbrel.com · its alternatives →

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    I have realized that a lot of people nowadays self-host services and set up home labs with mini racks. One major pain point I have come across personally is to quickly get health status from self-hosted services and machines, and have the ability to headlessly control my Raspberry Pi inside a mini rack. So It got me thinking about building a built-in GUI that users can easily add to their Raspberry Pi nodes in their (mini or full) racks or elsewhere. I have previously designed this GUI for an open source project I have been working on (called Ubo pod: github.com/ubopod) and decided to…

    2025 · getubo.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Wow, half a year has passed since my last blog. I have to admit, during this period I was a bit disconnected from the physical AI world. I transitioned to a different team at work after their two data scientists were reassigned to other teams, and I had to ramp up quickly to take over…

    Dec 2025 · airoboticist.blog · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    PikPak▲69

    Fast and safely collect files with up to 10TB private cloud

    2022 · mypikpak.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Hi HN, As a weekend project, I hacked together a physical phone, a Raspberry Pi running Asterisk and Twilio, to let toddlers safely make international calls. I’ve documented the setup in this write-up and published the code + Ansible playbooks on GitHub so others can replicate it. I built this so kids of expats can easily stay in touch with family on other continents. Would love feedback from anyone who’s worked on something similar or tries building this themselves! writeup: https://wip.tf/posts/telefonefix-building-babys-first-intern... github repos: -…

    2025 · wip.tf · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    🗒️ Personal Stock Control System. Contribute to timgrossmann/StorageSystem development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    PiBox▲75

    A modular Raspberry Pi storage server, supporting SATA SSDs

    2021 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey all - this is the software part of my cyberdeck, called the Slimedeck Zero. The Slimedeck Zero is based around this somewhat esoteric device called the PicoVision which is a super cool RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico) based device. It outputs relatively high-res video over HDMI while still being super fast to boot with low power consumption. The PicoVision actually uses two RP2040 - one as a CPU and one as a GPU. This gives the CPU plenty of cycles to run bigger apps (and a heavy python stack) and lets the GPU handle some of the rendering and the complex timing HDMI requires. You can do this…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    pi pod runs your pi session in a cloud pod. pipod.dev

    21d ago · pipod.dev · its alternatives →

  21. 21IB

    I am not sure if this is fits the HN community, but I am posting it here if people are interested. This is the current iteration of the car: http://i.imgur.com/ko8YBh.jpg Details: I wrote a simple android app that streams the accelerometer data from the phone to the pi over a simple socket. The pi then uses this data to drive the DC motor and the servo motor. Tilting the phone to control the car feels very natural. In this[0] pic you can see the wifi dongle I've used. I am using Adafruit Occidental v0.2[1] as my OS because it has support for my wifi dongle. It also makes some hardware…

    2012 · i.imgur.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22IB

    3D printed mouse replacement with Raspberry Pi Pico and PMW3360

    2023 · xythobuz.de · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Found that you can actually run a 35B Qwen model on a Pi with very impressive intelligence and stability. Built connectors for car ODB to read all about car internals, and manufacturer's cloud service for stuff like changing AC or opening/ locking doors. Gave it info such as the full car manual. And then hooked it up with my other agents in our discussion room! So now it can answer car questions such as "when should I add oil and what kind of oil?" and help you fully offline, and when online talk with the agent family that includes all the most powerful models so they know how the car…

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24RP

    2013 · raspberry.io · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →