If you can’t find the device you want, there’s no reason you can’t make it yourself from scratch—at least, that seems to be the trend in the Raspberry Pi community. Today we’ve got a project to share from a maker named Anil, aka one_free_man_ as he’s known as over at Reddit, who’s created a portable handheld device known as the Octapod.
The Octapod is built around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and runs DietPi, a low resource Linux operating system designed to create appliances. Backed up with a touchscreen interface, it works as a custom music player with the help of an application called Lollypop. Anil has programmed the Octapod so that it boots straight into the music-playing interface so no extra steps are necessary to load up your favorite songs.
In addition to the touchscreen, there are also a few buttons that can be used to control settings. A power button is used to safely turn the Pi on and off while a sync button is included to wake up the device, launch services, and close the music application.
As mentioned above, it’s built around a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and also uses a 2.8-inch Waveshare touchscreen along with a 3500mah battery as well as a 512GB micro SD card for storage. Holding everything together is a case made by Anil that he constructed using epoxy, rather than something laser cut or 3D printed.
Like most Pi projects shared with the community, this one is totally open source. Anil has made the source code available for anyone who wants to either make their own or just see how this one goes together. You can explore the code over at the original project thread at Reddit.
If you want to recreate this Raspberry Pi project, check out the full post and look for comments posted by Anil to get an idea of what hardware you’ll need and how to go about programming the handheld. Be sure to follow Anil, or one_free_man_, for more cool projects and any future updates on this one.
