A Raspberry Pi for Cord-Cutters

The open-hardware Ubo Pod, a personal AI assistant designed for hackers, is getting closer to its launch on Kickstarter. And in preparation for the upcoming launch, the team has just given the community an opportunity to provide input on a potential new feature. For those unfamiliar with the Ubo Pod, it is powered by a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 single-board computer. And this is not your typical, plain-vanilla AI assistant that only understands voice commands. It is designed to be hacked on, so the possibilities extend far beyond that, including into video.

With a Raspberry Pi, that of course means you will need an HDMI cable (and possibly an adapter) for video, and USB cables for any accessories. That can turn into a messy tangle of wires real quick, which is where the new Ubo Pod feature comes in. The team is working on giving full USB-C Alt Mode support to the Raspberry Pi. That allows the cable to carry not only traditional USB data signals, but also video and audio signals. With this addition, even a touchscreen monitor can be attached to a Raspberry Pi with a single cable.

At present, a board based on a reference design has been developed and demonstrated successfully. As a next step, the team is planning to build the circuit into an Ubo Pod sideboard so that it can be cleanly integrated with the AI assistant. If this is something that you might be interested in, leave a comment on the video below and it just might happen. I don’t know about you, but this is a feature that I would love to see built directly into future Raspberry Pis. That would certainly help make my workspace a lot tidier!