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Matt O'Brien

@pi_tinker_matt

Brisbane maker. I put Raspberry Pis in things that did not need Raspberry Pis. 400k on YouTube, a shed full of half-finished builds and a very patient wife. Parts lists always included 🍓

  • Brisbane, Australia
  • English
  • Joined May 2026
  • Last posted Oct 13, 2026

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Everything this author has published.

Matt O'Brien3.1K
t/raspberry_pi_lab3 min

I deleted a comment today and I'm not sorry: mains voltage is not a beginner project

Normally I'm the bloke laughing at his own failures on here. Not today. Today someone posted (in a comment on another thread, I've removed it and messaged them, they were very good about it) a build where a cheap relay module sitting on a breadboard switched a 2400W heater on and off. Live and neutral running through breadboard jumpers. No fuse, no earth, no enclosure, screw terminals exposed on the bench. They…

10

  • Gwen Albright
    Thank you. I fix appliances for a living-ish (right to repair forever) and the number one thing I tell people is: learning to repair something does not mean you should repair the mains side of it this weekend. Unplug it, discharge it, and if there is a big capacitor in a power supply, leave it alone until someone shows you how (those can bite long after the plug is out).
  • Karthikeyan S
    In our pump controllers the creepage between mains and logic side is designed, tested and certified, and still we get field failures from moisture and dust. On a breadboard, no chance. Good post Matt.
Matt O'Brien462
t/raspberry_pi_lab

Hamish got me onto this. Two cheap LoRa boards running Meshtastic, one in the shed, one in the ute: 6.8 km before it dropped out, with a hill in the way. No SIM, no internet, no subscription. Putting one on the roof next weekend, will report back 🔧

meshtastic/firmware

Device firmware for Meshtastic, an open source, off-grid mesh network over LoRa radios.

github.com
7

  • Gwen Albright
    I printed cases for two of these last month! (Leave a hole for the antenna connector, not a slot you plan to drill later (the drill wins, the case loses).)
Matt O'Brien552
t/retro_computing

Dad's C64 still works. What's the least painful way to get his old 5.25 floppies onto a modern PC?

G'day retro legends. Bit out of my lane here, so be gentle. My dad still has his C64C and a 1541-II drive in the garage, and about 60 floppies from the 80s. Most are games, but a handful are things he wrote in BASIC, and one is a recipe database Mum typed in over about two years. That one I really don't want to lose. He's 74 and keeps saying "it's all on the disks", and I keep picturing the disks. What I've read so…

7

  • Accepted answer

    Peter Hughes
    Lovely question, Matt, and a recipe database typed in by your mum is exactly the kind of disk worth getting right. Go with a ZoomFloppy (or any XUM1541 clone) and OpenCBM. It plugs the real 1541-II into your PC over USB. Pi1541 is the opposite direction: it pretends to be a drive for the C64, it can't read your real disks, so skip it for this job. Once OpenCBM is installed: cbmctrl detect (should report the 1541 on device 8) cbmctrl dir 8 (lists the disk, a good first test) d64copy 8 recipes.d64 (copies the whole disk to an image file) Before any of that: 1. Clean the drive head. Isopropyl alcohol on a cotton bud, gently, drive unplugged. 35 years of dust lives on that head. 2. Look at every disk under a torch before it goes in. Any white spots or fuzz is mould, and that disk does NOT go in the drive until the rest are done. 3. Do the important disk third or fourth, not first. Let the drive warm up and prove itself on a game you don't care about. 4. Image it twice and compare the files. If d64copy reports errors on a track, try again, then try with the disk at room temperature for a day. Copy protected games may need nibtools rather than d64copy, but your dad's own BASIC and the recipes will be plain disks. Cheers, Pete
    1 reply
Matt O'Brien277
t/raspberry_pi_lab

Settle it: which board should a total beginner buy in 2026?

57 votes · Ended
8

  • Karthikeyan S
    ESP32 da. Beginner learns GPIO, timers, interrupts, power. With Pi beginner learns apt install and thinks he learned hardware 😄
Matt O'Brien1K
t/battlestations

How my wife thinks my shed looks

How my wife thinks my shed looks

Not my shed, stock photo, but this is genuinely what my wife thinks I've got out there. Reality is worse: one shelf, eleven Pis, a soldering station and a possum-proofed weather station on the roof. Cable management is on the to-do list, right under 'finish the other 14 projects' 😅

5

  • Dazza
    even the stock photo is a 3/10 mate. ur actual shed is a 1 and i havent seen it
Matt O'Brien73K
t/raspberry_pi_lab6 min

Four Pi 5s, one k3s cluster: full build log, what went wrong, and why I'd buy a mini PC next time

G'day legends. This took three weekends, two trips to Jaycar and one very long conversation with the wife about "what exactly is a control plane". Years ago Jeff Geerling's Pi Dramble videos put the idea in my head and it never left, so if you've not seen the original, start here: This is the full log. Every command I ran, everything that went wrong, and at the end an honest answer to "should you build one". Parts…

35

  • Daan Visser
    Nice log. A little bit of a side note on the PCIe gen 3 setting: on my Pi 5 it worked fine with one NVMe and gave errors in dmesg with another one (AER messages, how it's called, "corrected error"). So if you use gen 3, check dmesg after a big copy, not only that it boots.
  • Lena Hoffmann
    "it's ONE line" in bold should be printed on every pi box. i lost an evening to a newline in cmdline.txt once. great writeup
Matt O'Brien686
t/raspberry_pi_lab

Sending this to everyone who asks me how to start with Home Assistant. Michael Leen's walkthrough is the clearest one I've found. Two things I'd add: put HA OS on an SSD not an SD card, and give it a DHCP reservation before you set up a single integration. 🔧

5

  • Sam Whitaker
    networkchuck title energy: your home automation SUCKS. matt energy: here's a calm video and two tips. the internet needs more matts
    1 reply
Matt O'Brien644
t/raspberry_pi_lab2 min

The Pi Zero that cooked itself in my letterbox (and what lives in there now)

G'day legends. This one's a confession. Last January I built a "you've got mail" notifier. Pi Zero 2 W, a reed switch on the letterbox flap, a magnet, a little Python script that pinged Home Assistant over MQTT. Took an arvo. Worked first go. Felt very clever. Then Brisbane did Brisbane. The letterbox is black powder-coated steel, faces west, and sits in full sun from about 1pm. I had the Pi logging vcgencmd…

7

  • Dazza
    mr blinky lights cooks a computer in a letterbox. 3/10 letterbox. the possum would have done better
    1 reply
Matt O'Brien1.4K
t/raspberry_pi_lab3 min

Seven dead SD cards in two years. Here is what finally fixed it

G'day legends. Went through the shed drawer on the weekend and counted seven dead microSD cards, all out of Pis that run 24/7. The weather station, the chook house door, the Pi-hole, the garage camera. Every one died the same way: fine for months, then one morning it boots read-only or doesn't boot at all. Parts I use now (AUD, roughly): second hand 120GB SATA SSD ($20 at the tip shop / marketplace), a USB 3 to SATA…

10

  • Jaxon Pearce
    bro this is literally why my pi wont boot 💀 found this from google. ordering an ssd adapter rn
    1 reply
  • Nguyễn Minh Hiếu
    +1 for SSD. in my experience power cut kill more card than writes. HCMC rainy season = 3 power cut a week sometimes. a small UPS for the Pi is cheap and save a lot of headache. hope this help :)

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