Turn a Maclock (a simple alarm clock inside a shockingly accurate miniature Macintosh shell) into a working Mac using a Raspberry Pi Zero. Buttons, brightness, sound, and battery all work.
- Maclock
- Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
- Waveshare 2.8 inch IPS LCD
- 3D printed screen bezel
- Macintosh Mini breakout board (if you want brightness, buttons, and sound). Open source design—here's a link to a cart on PCBway to order your own.
- Follow the Maclock hardware guide for instructions for assembling the Macintosh Mini.
I recorded a walkthrough video for how I assembled mine that goes into much more detail than the written guide:
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Install Raspberry Pi OS (lite) onto an SD card.
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Copy over a MacOS disk image and ROM file. Any
.hdafilename works — the script auto-discovers them in$HOME.scp ROM yourdisk.hda <user>@<pi_ip>:~/
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SSH into the Pi and run:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wr/macintosh-mini/main/setup.sh | bash -
The script will reboot your Pi when done, and it should Just Work™️
You can also do everything the script does by yourself: Maclock hardware guide and Sheepshaver install guide.
Getting help
Feel free to open a GitHub issue!
Credits
Startup chimes and crash sounds are mirrored from D. Schaub's Apple Sounds collection at https://froods.ca/~dschaub/sound.html. All sounds are © Apple, Inc.
Copyright © 2026 Wells Riley. The maclock-pcb/ PCB design is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The rest of the repository is published as-is for personal, non-commercial use.