Firehat HAT Brings FireWire DV Capture to Raspberry Pi

There is a shoebox in a lot of houses. It contains twenty years of family video on MiniDV tape, and the only machine that could read it died around 2011 along with the last laptop that shipped a FireWire port. The Firehat, launched on Crowd Supply on August 25, 2026, is a deliberately narrow fix for exactly that problem: a FireWire capture HAT for the Raspberry Pi 5.

• Built around a VIA VT6315N controller, the Firehat adds a native IEEE 1394 / i.LINK / DV port to any SBC with a Raspberry Pi PCIe FFC connector, including the Pi 5 and the Radxa ROCK 2F
• It captures from MiniDV, Digital8, DVCAM, DVCPRO and HDV camcorders, and controls the tape deck so an entire cassette can be digitized unattended
• The $79 pledge includes the main board, a 1.3-inch OLED screen, a 25mm coaxial shielded FPC cable and a 30cm 6-pin to 4-pin FireWire cable
• Hardware is open source under CERN OHL-S with GPL software; delivery is scheduled for February 3, 2027 against a $7,500 funding goal

Why FireWire Capture Still Needs Dedicated Hardware

DV over FireWire is not a video signal in the analogue sense — it is a digital stream with strict isochronous timing guarantees baked into the IEEE 1394 spec. That is why USB capture dongles do not solve this: they digitize an analogue output and hand you a re-encoded approximation, when the tape already holds a perfectly good digital stream you could copy bit for bit.

Getting that stream requires a real 1394 controller on a real PCIe bus, which is what the VT6315N provides. The Raspberry Pi 5's PCIe FFC connector is what makes a HAT-shaped version possible at all — a detail the Pi 5 generation quietly enabled and that the community has been mining ever since.

What Makes the Firehat Different From a Junk-Drawer PCI Card

You could, in principle, find an old FireWire card and a machine with a slot to put it in. People do. The friction is everything around the card: a working operating system with the right kernel modules, a capture tool that still builds, and the patience to babysit a one-hour tape in real time.

The Firehat bundles the rest of that. Software support runs through open Linux tooling including dvgrab and libavc1394 alongside the Equip-1 recorder stack, and the board carries a 1.3-inch OLED display, three RGB LEDs, tactile buttons and a buzzer so a capture session can be started and monitored without a keyboard or monitor attached. Because it drives the deck's transport controls, you can queue a full tape and walk away.

Is a $79 Board Worth It for a Shoebox of Tapes?

For one tape, no — a commercial transfer service is cheaper. For a shoebox, or for an archive, the arithmetic flips quickly, and the open licensing means the design outlives the campaign. Jeff Geerling, who has been documenting FireWire on the Pi through 2026, has covered the approach in detail, which is a reasonable sanity check on whether the software side actually works.

It also fits a pattern worth noticing: the Raspberry Pi 5 has quietly become the default host for reviving orphaned interfaces, in the same spirit as open-source IP-KVM projects that bring BIOS access back over SSH. More projects like this are on our mini computers page.

Sources: CNX Software — August 25, 2026; Crowd Supply campaign — August 2026; Jeff Geerling — 2026.