After ceaseless pleas from a colleague, Clemens at Elektor finally relented and built a YouTube subscriber counter for the office. And he turned to the harder, better, faster, stronger Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W to make it happen.

The above project video includes a side-by-side look at the original Raspberry Pi Zero W and its successor Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, as well as a speed test. It’s super handy if you’re unsure which board you need to support your own project.

To make a YouTube subscriber counter you will need:

• Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
• Seven-segment display
• Hand-crafted casing made from acrylic sheeting

How does it work?

A Python script running on the Raspberry Pi parses data collected from YouTube. Clemens found this ready-made one which requests your user count from YouTube. All you need is your channel ID and API key. Clemens shows you where to pull these from in the project video.

The display screen is wired up directly to the Raspberry Pi, and is supported by the luma.core Python library. Clemens added more features from the library so the display can scroll text, the date, and the time, as well as keeping track of your YouTube subscribers.

The neat little acrylic case make it easy to move the counter around without wires coming loose.

You can find all the project files on Clemens’ GitHub.