Five cool projects you can do with the Raspberry Pi
I've made a lot of posts about the Raspberry Pi in the past. I am a big fan of the device but if you haven't heard of it, check out my post linked above for an overview.
Five amazing and fun Raspberry Pi projects.
#5 RaspPlex
Use Plex? The Raspberry Pi is an excellent client for Plex as long as you do not need 4K it will perform as well as an Apple TV and other Plex client options. In fact, I found it to be better than all other options on the market until I needed 4K.
If you do not know what Plex is, Plex is a media center solution that hosts, organizes, and plays your Movies, TV Shows, Music, and PodCasts to any device in your home or pocket. Copy all your Bluray's to your Plex server and you can easily watch them while on the go on your iPhone, at home on your Raspberry Pi connected to your TV, or on your iPad while running on a treadmill.
RasPlex is a distribution that pre-configures everything you need to deploy the Plex client to a Raspberry Pi with very little effort. It also keeps it up to date and bundles it with extras to make for a better experience.
#4 Magic Mirror
One of the projects I have been wanting to do for a long time is to build a magic mirror. This involves taking an old LCD TV/Monitor and stripping the bezel off and creating a new frame behind a piece of clear glass-like material. You then build or use existing Dashboard software to create an interactive dashboard you can look at for a daily overview.
Some magic mirror projects take it further and add voice control to add the ability to interact with it or even a mobile app to customize and control it. Some of the more popular open source Magic Mirror dashboard packages include facial recognition to recognize who is in front of hte mirror.
Check out this video if you want to see it in action and what it can do.
#3 Voice Kit
"The AIY Voice Kit from Google lets you build your own natural language processor and connect it to the Google Assistant. All of this fits in a handy little cardboard cube, powered by a Raspberry Pi."
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Source
This was a kit featured MagPi Magazine and actually included for free in one edition. While you do not need the kit it does make the project easier having all the parts supplied in one bundle.
This is a fantastic gift idea for inspiring students.
#2 Octoprint
![image.png]
As a 3D printer, Octoprint is one of my favorite uses of the Raspberry Pi. Most 3D printers require a user to put their 3D prints on to an SD card and insert into the printer and then mess with the tiny buttons and screen on the printer to kick off a printing job.
Octoprint acts as a wireless (or wired ethernet) print server with additional functionality. Octoprint can tell you how long a job will take, allow you to easily kill the job, estimate material costs, as well as provide overheat protection and other functionality.
If you ever get into 3D printing, you should setup Octoprint before even making your first print. I would lose my mind if I didn't have it.
#1 Portable Gaming Console.
I wrote about this project around a year ago.
The above is a portable console built around the Raspberry Pi Zero W ($10) that runs emulation software for around 8,000 games developed between the 1970s and 2000.
Cool projects!
Sadly I already knew all.. :p
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I like the magic mirror actually our firm is now developing and promoting that gadget.
ǝɹǝɥ sɐʍ ɹoʇɐɹnƆ pɐW ǝɥ┴
Cool projects worth of doing :) Thanks for sharing this summary while promoting the pi! This is an awesome little baby full of potential uses.
In addition to octoprint: I am using the respberry pi zero w with my ender 2 via astroprint which is a simple derivate of octoprint. It was too confusing and too much options with octoprint for me - thats why i installed astroprint on it. It has my desired functionalities like:
Give it a try and you will love it (perhaps more than octoprint ^^)
I was looking at Astroprint at one point. I'm just so used to Octoprint and it's kind of the standard.
You use a single Pi to manage multiple printers?
A lot of that functionality is in Octoprint and it isn't really hard to use once you spend a few minutes with it.
No ev rs printer got his own pi - but with the zero w that doesn't cost so much more ^^
But yeah - I think I give it a second try and install it on one of the other pi's laying around :)
Thanks man!
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It's almost not worth getting a PI Zero, for most people they are hard to get at list price ($5/$10) and most of the time you are going to spend $20+, might as well spend $20-35 and get a Pi 3.
If you are in the UK, it's so much easier, but in the US it kind of sucks. Raspberry Pi's are price gouged.
Yeah that kind of sucks. I got 5 or so for 7,50€/piece as they got released. Now in Germany you get one for 15€ which is way better than 20+ :P
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In the US, you are stuck buying bundles with a bunch of stuff you don't want or pay 100-150% premium to buy it solo.
This is the $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W.
It's cheaper to just buy it as a bundle.
Pi 3B+ isn't gouged as much but still higher than the list price of $35.
But for $38 instead of $23 you get something that is way faster. I can usually get a decent deal on the Raspberry Pi 3 line when watching sales from Arrow, I bought a few at $20 with free overnight. But the Pi Zero still is at min 100% markup over the list price.
forwarding octoprint is easy and in combination with haproxy or nginx it can be done safely with authentication and SSL, too!
Octoprint's default web interface runs well on iOS and Android mobile browsers, even with live stream of the camera. Octopi: My printer, my rasberry, my privacy. All with free and open source software without relying on any third party.
Thus, there is really not need for a centralized "cloud" "solution" that tracks your printing habits.
Ooookay you convinced me :D I will give it a try!
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I haven't made a good looking portable gaming console with RPi yet, but I did something similar last year: https://steemit.com/untalented/@ahmadmanga/good-morning-steemit-or-retrogaming-x-retropie
Great read. Thanks @themarkymark
Something you'll be interested in @cryptonautic and @sidbohra
Hello.
As a Korean, I am honored to see your blusher well.
I've been trying to get it to be a print server for my current (non3d) printer. But yuck.... Problems with arm architecture and drivers... But I feel like I am very close in my tinkering.
The other thing I want to do is to get one of those IR transmitters so I can control various appliances with it but haven't gotten around to that yet.
I've got a raspberry pi set up w/ LibreElec & Kodi for my mediacenter, and another with RetroArch for gaming (not super into the portable gaming).
I've got another floating around with the piCamera and the piTouch screen, hooked up to an OBD2 car-diagnostics dongle, that I'm working on turning into a dash-computer / media center for my camper van.
I have yet another, just chillin' at home, with all the pieces needed to make a magic-mirror equivalent -- but I'm thinking of setting into a cupboard in the kitchen and using it for recipes and stuff like that as well.
I never would have known back in 2012 that this little computer would be so cool.
When the Pi came out, a lot of my friends who are into tech were raving about it, and I was like "sounds stupid". Been addicted to the Pi for years now, I think I have 12 or so of them.
Same -- I remember wondering why anyone would want a $45 rinky-dink, computer that can 'barely run anything', while I was ordering up a new i7 processor and a GTX-something-or-another video card for my desktop computer.
Since I've learned a little bit of coding in the last few years (python, specifically) -- it's really opened my eyes to how these little machines are changing the world.
Pretty sure they're now one of the top selling computer of all time, which is amazing since they've only been around since 2012 or so.
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