Before reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I thought of it as the canonical cliché self-help book. But as the saying goes, clichés become clichés because they’re true. The book’s insightfulness surprised me, and I found many of its ideas useful in my everyday life.

TinyPilot is my inexpensive, open-source device for controlling computers remotely. It works even before the operating system boots, so I use TinyPilot to install new OSes and debug boot failures on my bare metal homelab servers.

This post details my experience creating TinyPilot and shows how you can build your own for under $100 using a Raspberry Pi.

Highlights

• I sold my first pre-order for KVM Pi.
• Finding new ways to monetize Is It Keto is proving more difficult than I expected.
• I sold an Enterprise plan for Zestful.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Validate ideas for a sister product to Is It Keto

• Result: Tried a few different landing pages, but nothing gained traction
• Grade: B-

I forgot how difficult it is to find potential customers and engage them in thoughtful conversations about what kind of products or features would interest them.

Recent versions of the Raspberry Pi support USB on-the-go (USB OTG), which allows them to impersonate USB devices such as keyboards, thumb drives, and microphones. To take advantage of this, I made an open-source web app that turns my Pi into a fake keyboard. I call it Key Mime Pi.

This post demonstrates how Key Mime Pi works and how you can build one for yourself.

Demo

What you’ll need

• A Raspberry Pi that supports USB OTG:
  • Raspberry Pi 4 (all variants)
  • Raspberry Pi Zero W
  • Raspberry Pi A and A+ (verification needed)
    • This source claims that early Pis support USB OTG, but I have not tested these devices personally.
• Raspberry Pi OS (aka Raspbian)
  • Stretch or later
• A USB cable
  • For the Pi 4: USB-C to USB-A (Male/Male)
  • For the Pi Zero W: Micro-USB to USB-A (Male/Male)

Install Raspberry Pi OS Lite

To begin, install Raspberry Pi OS lite (formerly known as Raspbian) on a microSD card.

This book follows the author of the hit 90s computer game Prince of Persia through the game’s development, release, and several years after. The book consists of diary entries that author Jordan Mechner wrote during that time, with margin notes and accompanying photos and sketches Mechner added for publication.