19 Amazing Things You Can Do with Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi is an affordable single-board computer, the size of a credit card, that many hobbyists use in their DIY projects. Despite its size, the Raspberry Pi packs a punch in computing power, providing affordability and portability on the side.
Thus, it’s not strange to find it used in the creation of inexpensive machines, robots, wireless appliances, sensors and other forms of useful gadgetry and even As a programming toy for children.
In this post, we bring to you a compilation of some cool things tech enthusiasts have done with Raspberry Pi. These are the kinds of projects that you can replicate and try yourself as the guides and video tutorials have been included here for your reference.
Let us know in the comments if we missed any other cool projects that are powered with Raspberry Pi.
Gaming machine
Pi Arcade Table is your retro-gaming arcade table backed by the Raspberry Pi and packed in a beautiful case with hand controllers. This project lets you enjoy NES and other old games at a cheap price, and the workstation is even a good gaming platform for children.
Netbook
LapPi is your home-made, personal laptop built using Raspberry Pi, LCD screen, and some other materials. Though this project involves numerous steps, yet it’s easy and comes with clear guidelines. At the end of the day, you’ll have a netbook that’s a lot cheaper than a branded one and utilizes the power of your Pi.
Twitter Bot
Pi Twitterbot turns your Raspberry Pi into a fully-functional Twitter engine. It allows you to easily manage your Twitter account, receive and read tweets, send messages to other users, and interact with your beloved followers.
Portable Game Console
Pi Portable Game Console is an intriguing project that lets you enjoy your favorite games whenever and wherever you want without having to spend hefty amount of money for a PSP. PiJuice, a battery module, powers your Pi console system in place of the power converters or intricate charging circuits.
Solar Weather Station
Pi Solar Weather Station is a home-made weather station powered by Raspberry Pi and PiJuice. It consists of temperature, humidity, and general air quality sensors that record and send precise weather calculations through a wireless connection. It uses waterproof cables and thus, it’s mostly capable of sustaining itself off the grid.
Multi-Room Music Player
Pi Multi-room Music Player is a low-cost alternative to branded and expensive players. This project allows you to easily upgrade your old music system by integrating it with Raspberry Pi. The integration lets you control the music player wirelessly from anywhere in the house with just your smartphone.
Radio
Pirate Radio is your personal Pi radio that can be built using a radio receiver, SD card, network cable, Raspberry Pi, and some code. It can tune into all your favorite channels, and help you find the clearest FM frequency to listen in the best quality.
Microwave
Picrowave is better than any traditional microwave. It gives you more control and adds many functionalities, for example: voice control, tweets poster, remote access through a web interface or smartphone, and a barcode scanner to get cooking instructions from an online database.
“Magic Mirror”
Magic Mirror is a Pi-backed high-tech mirror that can do many more things than just showing your image or reflection. It can show you the time, abstract texts, weather reports and hottest headlines for the day.
Printer
Internet-of-Things Printer is a small thermal printer that can do many tasks based on your programming. For example, it can print the weather forecast in the morning, a puzzle for you to solve while riding the subway, a list of tweets from your favorite tweeters, etc.
Automating Your Home Lights
Raspberry Pi GPIO home automation is a project that allows you to control the lights from anywhere in the house. You can even switch on or off the lights via a web app using your smartphone.
Humidity & Temperature Sensors
DHT Humdity Sensing With GDocs Logging lets you know the precise levels of humidity and temperature of your home, garden, or office. It even stores the live temperature/humidity data to a Google Spreadsheet for future reference or for automation. The requirements for this project are Raspberry Pi and DHT11 Sensor.
Touchscreen Camera
Pi Touchscreen Camera is a simple yet fascinating "focus and shoot" touchscreen digital camera. It’s also capable of transferring pictures directly to your computer with the help of Dropbox and Wi-Fi connection for storing and editing purposes.
Touchscreen Tablet
This Pi Tablet Tutorial is a simple tablet built using Raspberry Pi and an LCD screen. It’s a cheap replacement for branded tablets, and runs on the processing power of your Pi. Moreover, you can choose the screen size and storage capacity as per your requirements.
3D Scanner
Multiple Raspberry PI 3D Scanner can capture 3-Dimensional images of objects or living bodies. It’s a home-made alternate replacement for costly scanners, and is built using multiple Pi’s and Pi Cameras. The created image can be printed using a 3D printer or you can make an order to any 3D-printing company for its 3D model.
Touchscreen Car Dashboard
Pi Touchscreen Car Computer is your own affordable smart car dashboard built using a Raspberry Pi and an LCD screen. The dashboard can play music and videos, and do many more tasks with the right code.
Robot
This project is part robot building, and part learning to program with Python. Basically the tutorial is about how you can use a Python GUI and Raspberry Pi to build your Arduino robot.
Audio Book Player
Kolibre Vadelma, is an open-source player client that is powered by Raspberry Pi. With it, you can build an audio book player that will be a great reading aid for the visually impaired.
Security Camera Network
Here’s an affordable way to secure your premises with Pi-powered security cameras. The network can have multiple cameras configured both locally and over a network. It is capable of capturing still images as well as stream videos. You can also set up motion detection and email notification by adding a bit of code.
Which is your favorite Pi project? Which will you try building first? Let us know in the comments.