Stay busy in your Vault with a Raspberry Pi Zero Pipboy

While being holed up in the Vaults living off our stash of Nuka cola, we’ve come across this mammoth junk-build project, which uses Raspberry Pi Zero W to power a working Pipboy.

UK-based JustBuilding went full Robert House and, over several months, built the device’s body by welding together scrap plastic. Raspberry Pi Zero W serves as the brain, with a display header mounted to the GPIO pins. The maker wrote a Pipboy-style user interface, including demo screens, in Python — et voilà…

Lucky for him, semiconductors were already invented but, as JustBuilding admits, this is not what we’d call a beginner’s project. Think the Blue Peter show’s Tracey Island extravaganza, except you don’t have crafty co-presenters/builders, and you also need to make the thing do something useful (for our US readers who just got lost there, think Mr Rogers with glitter glue and outdoor adventure challenges).

The original post on Instructables is especially dreamy, as JustBuilding has painstakingly produced a really detailed, step-by-step guide for you to follow, including in-the-making photos and links to relevant Raspberry Pi forum entries to help you out where you might get stuck along the way.

And while Raspberry Pi can help you create your own post-apocalyptic wristwear, we’re still working on making that Stealthboy personal cloaking device a reality…

If you’re lucky enough to have access to a 3D printer, the following is the kind of Pipboy you can knock up for yourself (though we really like JustBuilding’s arts’n’crafts upcycling style):

11 comments

Alex Bate avatar

Dear Ashley
This is a lovely first ever Raspberry Pi blog post
Well done!

Ashley Whittaker avatar

*blush emoji*

Justin Hart avatar

Ashley – awesome blog – thanks for covering this :D

Ashley Whittaker avatar

Glad you saw this, Justin. I couldn’t leave a comment on YouTube for you :-D

Justin Hart avatar

Yeah no worries, my kids sometimes share videos on that channel for their friends, so I locked down all comments ;)

Dougie Lawson avatar

When does the rest of https://raspberrypi.org get the new wallpaper and curtain?

ProDigit avatar

This is not a zero, but a rpi 3a of 3b or 4b

Justin Hart avatar

It really is a 0. Check the build photos

vol.2 avatar

Fun article. Thanks Ashley!
Just FYI here. It’s “Nuka” cola. It’s the sort thing that could trigger certain people.

Ashley Whittaker avatar

Fixed it! (face palm) ?‍♀️

Michael Lorusso avatar

Hi therr Justin amazing work! I have a question for you if you if I can borrow a moment of your time, Ive been working on mine own as well. But I’ve been having a heck of a Time trying to mount an image to an SD card for the pie to be able to boot the PIP-Boy program I was just wondering what image file you used or did you make your own custom image file? And if you would be able to help me on how to install it onto a SD micro card I’ve tried following Instructables and I’ve tried following Adafruit (version I built), but unfortunately I’ve had no luck thank you for your time and reading this
-mike

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