There’s no end to the purposes you can put a Raspberry Pi to. Here are 12 of our favourite DIY projects for the popular and tiny computer.
If you’ve got a few spare weekends up your sleeve, tackling these 12 fun projects is a great way to spend them. If you don’t own a Raspberry Pi and are keen to buy a kit, head to the bottom of the article for a link to the online store.
Build A Weather Station
Using a Raspberry Pi to power a weather station is one of the most popular projects out there, but Make tossed in a few extra details, including a handy display that shows how the weather’s changed.
Build A Dash Cam With Live Streaming Capabilities
We’ve seen a Raspberry Pi used as a dash cam before, but over on PubNub they took the same concept, but also have a live-streaming capability provided you can set up a hot spot on your smartphone.
Build Your Own Smartphone
You’ve got to temper your expectations here. Or to put it another way, you’re not going to be building a Samsung Galaxy S6 out of your Pi. But it can be done if you’re keen.
Build A MIDI Sampler
Samplers are an awesome way to have millions of different sounds at your fingertips. If you want to build your own, SamplerBox is a project that just requires a Raspberry Pi and a little free time.
Build A Smartphone-Connected Door Lock
You can purchase a smart lock that you control with your phone easily enough, but it’s much more fun to actually make one yourself. YouTubers Hacker House make one with a Raspberry Pi.
Build A GoPro
OK, not quite a GoPro. It’s a trademark, for starters. But it is feasible to use a Raspberry Pi as the brains of your very own action camera.
Build A Wi-Fi Drone Disabler
If you’re looking for an interesting project to work on this weekend, you can turn a Raspberry Pi into a device that will drop Wi-Fi controlled drones right out of the sky with just a tap of your finger.
Build A Network Analyser Tool
Network problems getting you down? A Raspberry Pi can make a great network analysis machine.
Build A Picture Frame That Automatically Rotates To Match Photo Orientations
Digital photo frames are great, but when you’re using one to display a slideshow, it tends to look terrible when it displays photos in the opposite orientation of how you have it set up. Over on Hackaday, Tim made a frame that automatically rotates to show the best picture.
Build A VPN Router
We’ve previously shown you how to use a Raspberry Pi as both a Tor proxy and a personal VPN. Here’s how to do both in one unit for truly anonymous browsing everywhere.
Build An Animated GIF Camera
A camera that only shoots GIFs might sound a little ridiculous, and it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a fun use for a Raspberry Pi Zero.
Build A Talking Radio
The idea of a machine that talks to you intelligently might be a ways off still, but Instructables user MisterM wanted to make a radio that would announce general details throughout the day. To do this, he wired up a Raspberry Pi Zero to a text-to-speech engine, then tossed in a dose of If This Then That.
Don’t have a Raspberry Pi? You can buy the Raspberry Pi 3 in Australia from RS Components. Click here for details.
Comments
5 responses to “12 DIY Raspberry Pi Projects That Are Worth Building”
This article is based on very old information. The tech I see moving so fast that articles like this could be useful if they’ve were based on information that was, at most, 6 months old (instead of 2 years).
I am sure this article gets posted every 3 months.
then bumped every two weeks
Having just jumped into Pi, the projects listed here are pretty lackluster. My top 3 would be:
1. Arcade game system
2. Ad blocker (pi hole)
3. Security camera with notifications
The Arcade Pi usually tops every “Best Pi Projects” list, so its a surprise that its not even mentioned in some aspect.
Security cameras appear fairly regularly as well, so ditto.
Not sure on the ad blocker, though it seems like a nice choice. But that’s one of the benefits of the Pi. It can be used to do so much.