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I Made an Alexa Knockoff That Doesn’t Spy on Me

DIY Raspberry Pi smart screen

Dave Gershgorn
Debugger
5 min readOct 7, 2020

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Photos courtesy of the author

Smart assistants come with a lot of baggage.

I like the idea of having a smart screen on my desk. It’s a decidedly sci-fi concept: A little dashboard that’s specifically coded to display up-to-date information from all different sources that I want to see, without distractions or extraneous features.

But I don’t want a device with a microphone or a camera on it. I don’t want Amazon or Google to set what’s on my device, and I don’t trust them with an audio feed in my home.

So, I built my own.

The project took about 45 minutes, and it was shocking in its simplicity. The result is a smart screen that displays the time, my calendar, and a detailed local weather forecast, with room to add more information as I want. It’s also a local server to share some of my noncritical files between computers, after my commercially built NAS was hacked.

The entire project was seeded by a video I saw on YouTube from a channel called ETA Prime. The channel features single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi, and the accompanying accessories that third-parties build to make the tiny computers more useful. ETA Prime suggested this seven-inch touchscreen display, which I bought and has worked flawlessly so…

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Dave Gershgorn
Dave Gershgorn

Written by Dave Gershgorn

Senior Writer at OneZero covering surveillance, facial recognition, DIY tech, and artificial intelligence. Previously: Qz, PopSci, and NYTimes.

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