DEV Community: Maria Dunning

Midnight Rescue: The Ultimate Raspberry Pi Hackathon Revival Guide 🚀

Maria Dunning — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 02:40:42 +0000

Howdy Hackers!
I'm assuming you are here because your Raspberry Pi is acting up. Going to do a small intro here before jumping to the recipe for this cookbook but going to keep it short so you can get back to hacking :)

My name is Maria, I work for Major League Hacking, and we bring hardware to many of the events we support including Raspberry Pis! I get lots of questions asking about debugging, and our documentation has 3 different resources we point to for Raspberry Pis. We wanted to consolidate here, but as a full disclaimer, we used AI to help us with the merge. If you see something wonky, just comment so that I and others can see what is off.

Now to the meat and potatos you are here for.

Midnight Rescue: The Ultimate Raspberry Pi Hackathon Revival Guide 🚀

Welcome, midnight builder! It’s late, your code is almost there, but your Raspberry Pi is throwing a full-blown tantrum. Don't panic! Hackathon hardware gets heavily used, and SD cards often carry ghost settings or corruption from previous events. You didn't break anything—this is just a right of passage.

We’ve provided a Troubleshooting Kit in the Hardware Lab specifically to handle this exact moment. Grab your kit, take a breath, and let’s get your hardware back on track step by step! Please note that this kit must stay at the Hardware Lab table so that others can use it during the event as needed. Feel free to pull up a chair as you debug!

🧰 Meet Your Troubleshooting Toolkit

Before diving in, make sure you’ve grabbed the Hardware Lab’s Troubleshooting Kit. Inside your toolkit, you’ll find:

Tool	What It Does
7-Inch Portable Screen & HDMI Cable	Gives you direct visual access to the Pi’s terminal—no network magic needed!
Mini Bluetooth/Wireless Keyboard	Allows you to type commands directly into the Pi setup screen.
USB MicroSD Card Reader/Writer	Lets you plug SD cards into your laptop to wipe or re-flash them.
Fresh Spare MicroSD Cards	Clean, blank slates ready for a brand-new OS installation.

We’ll use these tools in two main phases: Direct Hardware Diagnostics (seeing what’s wrong) and SD Card Re-Flashing (resetting to a squeaky-clean state).

Phase 1: Direct Visual Diagnostics (Using the Kit)

Instead of guessing why you can’t SSH into your Pi, let's look directly at what it's doing on boot!

Plug in the HDMI Cable: Connect the Micro-HDMI end to your Raspberry Pi 4 (use HDMI 0, the port closest to the USB-C power port) and the standard HDMI end to the 7-inch screen.
Power the Screen & Keyboard: Turn on the 7-inch screen and plug in the mini keyboard's USB dongle into one of the Pi’s USB slots.
Power Up the Pi: Plug in the USB-C power cord. Watch the screen!

What are you seeing on screen?

Rainbow Screen / Red LED only: The Pi can’t read the SD card at all. Move straight to Phase 2 below!
Kernel Panic / Endless Errors scrolling past: The OS on the SD card is corrupted from a previous team. Head to Phase 2 to re-flash it!
Asks for Login: The OS is alive! Try default credentials (pi / raspberry). If that fails, someone changed the password—time for a quick re-flash in Phase 2.

Phase 2: Nuclear Option—Wiping & Re-Flashing the MicroSD Card

If the SD card is corrupted or locked, re-flashing gives you a 100% clean OS in just a few minutes. Grab a spare MicroSD card from the kit or use your current one.

Step 1: Format & Wipe the Card

Insert the MicroSD card into the USB Reader/Writer and plug it into your laptop.

Windows: Download and open SD Formatter or Raspberry Pi Imager. Select your SD card drive, select Quick Format, and click Format.
Mac / Linux: You can use Raspberry Pi Imager or Disk Utility to format the card to FAT32.

Step 2: Flash the Operating System

We recommend using Raspberry Pi Imager (or Win32 Disk Imager / BalenaEtcher):

Download the latest Raspbian / Raspberry Pi OS Lite (or full desktop version) zip/img.
Open your imaging software and select the downloaded .img or .zip file.
Select your USB SD Card Reader as the target device.
Click Write / Flash! (This takes about 5 to 10 minutes—great time to grab a snack!).

Important Note: Windows might pop up messages after flashing saying "You need to format the disk in drive X: before you can use it." Ignore and close these pop-ups! Windows just doesn't natively read Linux partitions.

Step 3: Enable Headless SSH Access

Want to control your Pi from your laptop terminal without keeping the 7-inch screen attached forever?

Keep the SD card plugged into your laptop. Open your file explorer.
Look for the drive partition named boot.
Inside the boot directory, create a brand-new empty file and name it simply ssh (make sure there is no file extension like .txt or .docx!). # On Mac/Linux terminal, you can just run: touch /Volumes/boot/ssh
Eject the SD card safely and insert it into your Pi.

Phase 3: Connecting to Your Pi via Ethernet or SSH

Now that your Pi has a fresh OS and SSH enabled, let’s get you connected!

Option A: Direct Screen & Mini Keyboard (Fastest!)

Just leave the 7-inch screen and mini keyboard plugged into the Pi. Boot it up, log in with default credentials (username: pi, password: raspberry), and start coding!

Option B: Ethernet / Network SSH Connection

Connect an Ethernet cable from the Pi into your computer (use a USB Ethernet adapter if needed).
Power up the Pi. Give it about 60 seconds to complete its initial boot routines.
Open your laptop's terminal (or PuTTY on Windows) and run: ssh pi@raspberrypi.local
When prompted, enter the default password: raspberry
Test your connection by running a quick ping test: ping -c 4 google.com

🎉 You're Back in Business!

If you see ping responses coming back, congratulations—you have successfully brought your Raspberry Pi back from the dead at 12:30 AM! You are now ready to build your awesome hackathon project.

Still stuck or getting unexpected error messages? Don't hesitate to flag down an MLH Coach! We are here to help you. Happy hacking!

Unlocking Casual Fun: AI-Powered 'Vibe Coding' for Quick, Niche Apps

Maria Dunning — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:06:56 +0000

I recently heard the comparison that AI is the smartphone of our generation.

Smartphones made taking photos easier for people to do casually. Do you still need experts to professionally shoot events, use the right equipment, and know the best lighting and angles? Yes. But the average person can take photos of their kids or pets for fun memories anytime.

AI “vibe” coding has opened up casually playing around with code and making small custom apps in the same way. Some people use it to learn, some use it for fun. Some people just want to see what it can do.

I play a game called FFXIV with a group of 48 people each week, working through a dungeon called Forked Tower: Blood. We have inside jokes, common things that happen in-game, and do special themed glams for the holidays.

Our Christmas Glams

Recently, we planned a meme night. The group was chatting about common memes and taking a drink each time X happened. I wanted to make sure people had fun rather than getting sick, so I quickly suggested bingo instead. It would also allow those not drinking to still have fun tracking the memes. I tossed in a couple of emotes as a prize for the first 5 to get bingo.

However, we only had about 3 hours until the run was going to start.

Google’s AI Studio helped me get set up quickly and easily. I needed specific features: the ability to import and export custom board items, a way to get a PNG of their board for winner verification, and fast randomization. I also needed a simple way to share it quickly without dealing with the fees or limitations of online bingo board generators. After I guided AI Studio to the point where I was ready to get the group's input(because the initial meme ideas were so cringe and I could only make about 20 off the top of my head), I hit publish. Google’s integration there meant I had a working URL to share within a minute.

One of our first night’s winning boards

We had a ton of fun. Lots of laughter was had tracking the night's shenanigans, and it cost 80 cents to host it (well, zero with my free-tier credits). I was asked to do it again the week after, but make it more egg hunt focused (the next run was the weekend of Easter). In the game, there is a limited-time event called HatchingTide, so I made a new theme for the board where they had a chance to randomly find eggs as they tracked their bingo. I also made a more vaporwave version of the board that had no mention of drinking for those who don’t want that on their board, but still wanted to participate. I fleshed out a safety version for “prog” runs where the focus was leaning and actually progressing through the fight. Now that I had a week to plan instead of 3 hours, I could play around with it more and add more options for the randomization.

Our winning HatchingTide board

AI isn’t perfect. I had to redirect it a few times. I wanted to revert to a previous version, but it remembered the prompts after the revert and brought back the changes I had tried to erase. It needed lots of manual checking, and I exported my options frequently in order to make sure that if it hallucinated that they needed to change, I could just copy and paste instead of fully reverting. There were UI changes that just did not make sense, and the options it chose initially made no sense to someone who actually plays the game. But it gave a great base for me to adjust to make something quickly for our group.

Because it needs that review, because what it creates is not always going to work or is going to have a ton of unnecessary code, our expert photographers will always be needed. This board will never be prod-ready.

I know there is a lot of anti-AI sentiment out there. I added a footer on the site says flame me if you want, and I want to acknowledge that we need to figure out how to support the artists and creators whose content trains the models. I want the art of my in-game character for my profile picture to be created by an actual artist. I want people who understand the game to help design collabs that actually mean something. We don’t need to shove AI at every problem. But focused use to help people quickly create what they otherwise wouldn’t have had the ability to do is amazing. I’m keeping an open mind as we see where AI takes us.

Our Valentines Glams