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. Maybe you only like one news source, and that news source happens to be the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). If this is the case, you might like to take a look at this project by (Ron Grimes).

(Ron) built a device that does one thing and one thing only: displays CBC news. It’s built around a Raspberry Pi 2, and the project started when he wanted to interface a keyboard just to see if he could. That done, the next challenge was to integrate a 16 × 2 character HD44780 LCD screen. Once these two tasks were completed, the question was simple: what to show? He thought it would be helpful to log onto the CBC news feed, and the Chocolate Box News Reader was born.

The device displays 29 news feeds in total, including top news, world news and Canadian regional news. It stores 15 news stories per feed and will keep these news stories even if the internet goes down. The player will display the entire stored news story in approximately 90 minutes, and each stored item will be accompanied by more information if something strikes (Ron’s) curiosity or interest. The files are on GitHub for those curious.

It’s a neat build, and we can imagine it being a smart item to have around the house. It was also a great way for (Ron) to lean on his familiarity with the Raspberry PiAlso. In the meantime, if you have your own nifty Pi-based (or other!) projects, feel free to write to us!