How I built a senior tablet with Raspberry Pi in a week — and what I would have done differently

The package arrived on a weekday evening. I opened it on the kitchen table and felt a rush of adrenaline I hadn't experienced in a long time. Screws, a flat screen, a ribbon cable, an SD card, a power supply. Everything spread out in front of me. And me, staring at it all, wondering where to begin.

An order placed in the dark

A few days earlier, I had spent hours searching online for a touchscreen that could mount directly onto the back of a Raspberry Pi 4. I wanted something compact, not too expensive — and above all with enough resolution to display family photos sharply and beautifully. Not a toy screen.

The problem was that I had no reference point. I was reading forums, comparison articles, Reddit threads in English. I eventually placed the order. I hoped I'd made the right choice.

I hadn't told anyone. This was an entirely personal, secret project. My father's birthday was coming up. He had Alzheimer's. And for a while, I'd been thinking about building something for him — not a gadget, not a baffling generic tablet — but an object designed for him, for his life, for his needs. Something that would feel like his.

First evening: the high, then the cold shower

I had subscribed to ChatGPT a few days before the hardware arrived. I had no Python skills whatsoever. But I was optimistic — perhaps too much so.

The first step, installing Linux on the SD card, went perfectly. It's guided, almost automatic. I said to myself: we're off.

Then I plugged in the screen. The resolution was excellent — exactly what I wanted — but as a result, everything displayed in miniature. The system text was unreadable. I spent time figuring out how to adjust it in the configuration files. First stumbles.

Then I asked ChatGPT to generate a Python script to display an image. It gave me one in a matter of seconds. I copied it, ran it. And there it was — those two simultaneous emotions: wonder — an image was showing on a screen I had assembled with my own hands — and disappointment — it didn't fill the screen, it floated there, badly framed, not fitting the format at all.

That first image was this one.

A photo I had taken in Paris — sharp, well composed. And yet there on the screen, it looked like a postage stamp lost in an oversized frame. That gap — between what I had in my head and what I saw in front of me — defined the entire week that followed.

I also needed a way to transfer photos to the tablet without plugging in a USB stick each time. I installed Samba, a network file-sharing protocol. It worked. That was already a real step forward.

It was late. I went to bed telling myself I would never be ready in time for the birthday.

The real face of ChatGPT as a coding tool

A rhythm quickly established itself: evenings after work, one or two hours in front of the screen. And a cycle that repeated endlessly — send a request to ChatGPT, get the code, copy it to the tablet, run it, read the error message, send it back to ChatGPT, wait for the fix, run it again. And repeat.

I quickly understood two contradictory things: ChatGPT was a remarkable tool — without it, I wouldn't have moved an inch — and at the same time, this way of working was going to be far slower than I'd imagined. Each loop took time. Each fix revealed three new problems. I didn't have the foundation to understand why something wasn't working. I had to trust the machine, learn as I went, and hold a course I hadn't yet clearly defined.

That's where I learned what it means to be humble before code. And before a project.

What I absolutely did not want to build

In the middle of that first week's chaos, something clarified itself. Not in a document, not in a meeting — in my head, in the evenings, while testing scripts that were crashing. I started naming what I refused. And those refusals became the foundations of the project.

I didn't want a fan. No noise, no wasted energy. If the device was going to run for hours in a living room, it had to be silent and efficient. Energy sobriety wasn't a technical constraint — it was a form of respect.

I didn't want Internet to be required. If the router goes down, if the Wi-Fi drops, the tablet must keep working exactly the same. The photos, the time, the cached weather, the radio stored locally — all of it has to stay right there. This isn't a cloud application. It's a device that belongs to the person using it.

I didn't want data leaving the home. No account to create. No terms and conditions to accept. Family photos, daily habits, the private life of an elderly person — none of that should end up on a server somewhere to be analysed, monetised, or simply stored without meaningful consent.

I didn't want social networks. No integrated Facebook, no algorithmic news feed, no platform whose business model rests on attention and dependency. That's not what an elderly person needs. That's not what my father needed.

And above all, I wanted it to be simple. One person had to be able to use this without help, without learning, without getting lost: my father.

What I managed to build in a week

By the end of that first week, I had a working slideshow. Photos dropped from my computer via network sharing, appearing on the screen, scrolling through. Silently. Cleanly.

It wasn't the gift I had imagined giving for the birthday. But it was a result I wouldn't have thought possible a week earlier. I had never written a single line of Python. And there I was with a physical device, assembled and programmed with my own hands, doing something useful.

I stopped chasing an imaginary deadline. And I shifted into what would become my permanent way of working on this project: move in small steps, test, adjust, repeat.

What I would have done differently

I'm not talking about mistakes. I'm talking about what I learned the hard way, and wouldn't do the same way again.

I would have designed before touching the keyboard. I started running without knowing where I was going. Features were added as I went, sometimes contradicting each other. If I had spent one evening writing on paper — just on paper — what I really wanted to build, for whom, and with what constraints, I would have saved weeks of detours. I eventually did that work. Too late.

I would have installed Git on the very first evening. For a long time, I didn't know which version of the script was the right one. I was afraid to change something that worked. Being able to go back, understand what had changed, not fear breaking things — that's the basic freedom for developing anything. I denied myself that freedom out of impatience.

I would have structured my working environment. I was coding directly on the tablet, with no organisation. Files piled up. It seems trivial at first. It quickly becomes a real obstacle.

These three things aren't technical. They're a question of mindset. Taking time to lay the foundations means going faster afterwards. It's as simple and as difficult as that.

Not a photo frame

What guided me throughout that week was a conviction I couldn't yet put into words: what I was building was not a digital photo frame.

My father had Alzheimer's. He needed anchors in time — knowing what time it was, what day, what the weather was like outside. He needed to hear familiar voices, the radio, the news. He needed to see the faces of the people he loved without having to ask someone to turn something on for him. And all of this had to be there, available, without him needing to search, without him needing to press the right button.

I wanted the tablet to show him the right things at the right time of day. Photos in the morning. The weather on waking. The radio with a single touch. News headlines to stay connected to the world. The time and date, always visible, large, clear — because for someone losing their bearings, knowing it's Tuesday morning, that it's a fine day, and that his daughter sent a photo from the weekend — that matters enormously.

I built it for my father. My mother needs it the most today.

That week, I didn't yet have all the words to describe what I wanted to do. But I had the reason to do it. And that's what allowed me to keep going, evening after evening, despite the bugs, despite the lack of time, despite the gift that wasn't ready.

It's also what continues to guide every decision on this project today. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, here's what Simone sees and what runs behind the screen →