Mehrdad Majzoobi's Ubo, Launching This Spring, Is Designed for Raspberry Pi Smart Home Projects

Engineer Mehrdad Majzoobi is looking to make it easier to integrate the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer (SBC) into smart homes with Ubo, a "Smart Edge Pod" which integrates as much functionality as possible into a compact box.

"I have always wanted to build a modular and open source system that can be extended and altered by other makers and it can serve as a platform for learning and developing new applications," Majzoobi explains. "Something that instils curiosity, invites the user to learn about its inner workings, to hack around it, tinker with it, and/or customize it to their needs. Given Raspberry Pi's popularity among makers and in education and the fact that I have used [them] in many of my past projects, it proved to be the perfect foundation for building a system around it."

That system: Ubo, a "Smart Edge Pod" which places a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC into a aluminium and wood-veneer housing with a host of extra hardware in order to provide a one-stop solution to a range of smart home use-cases. There's a 1.54" 240×240 IPS display with user-programmable buttons, dual stereo microphones, a light sensor, a temperature sensor infrared transmitter and receiver pair, stereo speakers, a ring of 27 addressable RGB LEDs, and an on-board Infineon OPTIGA TRUST M SLS32AIA security coprocessor — alongside a privacy slider for a Raspberry Pi Camera Module mounted in the case's front and a hardware disconnect switch for the microphones.

The hardware is only half the Ubo story, though. Majzoobi's vision is for the Ubo to be a full-stack platform, not just a Raspberry Pi in a box, complete with a software development kit (SDK) which makes it as easy as possible to develop applications to run atop the Ubo. Expansion, meanwhile, is possible via USB, STEMMA/Qwiic connectors, and a series of planned shield accessories — details of which have yet to be released.

"Ubo brings a rich UI/UX [User Interface/User Experience] layer to the popular Raspberry Pi platform which can be customized and extended by the makers," Majzoobi claims. "It comes with an SDK and a set of sample applications to quickly get started. It is a perfect extension to Raspberry Pi for learning programming, implementing and deploying headless applications, and event building custom hardware around it. The limit is your imagination."

Majzoobi plans to launch an Ubo Smart Edge Pod Developer's Edition this spring, with more information available on the project's website; design files for the PCBs are available on GitHub under the reciprocal GNU General Public License 3, with separate repositories for the SDK and the mechanical design files.