Compact, dedicated news reader will always bring you CBC

Your phone or laptop will give you access to the vast majority of the world’s news in languages ​​you can read and a few hundred you can’t. However, perhaps you only like one news source, and that news source is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If so, you might want to take a look at this project (Ron Grimes).

(Ron) created a device that does one thing and one thing only: display CBC news. It’s built on a Raspberry Pi 2 and the project started when he wanted to plug in a keyboard just to see if he could do it. After this, the next task was to integrate the 16×2 character HD44780 LCD display. Once these two tasks were completed, the question became simple – what to display? He decided it would be useful to connect to the CBC news feed, and the Chocolate Box news reader was born.

The device displays a total of 29 news feeds, including breaking news, world news and regional Canadian news. It stores 15 news stories per channel and will save those stories even if the Internet goes down. The reader will display the entire stock of saved news in about 90 minutes or so, and each saved item contains additional information if something piques (Ron’s) curiosity or interest. For those curious, the files are on GitHub.

It’s a neat design and we can imagine it being a smart item to wear around the house. It was also a great way for (Ron) to solidify his familiarity with the Raspberry Pi. In the meantime, if you have some great Pi-based projects of your own – or others! – don’t hesitate to write to us!