I love retro games so i bought a Raspberry Pi 3 to run Retropie, then later switched to Recalbox because it has an awesome feature called 'rewind' that lets you to turn back time in games.
But there is so much more to Raspberry Pi than just building a retro gaming machine. Here are some other cool and fun projects i have tried out (for educational purposes) and they are all quite easy to install since they most of them comes as a disk image you can write to a mirco SD card and boot it up.
First of all, in case you have never heard of Raspberry Pi (shame on you):
The Raspberry Pi is a series of credit card-sized single-board computers developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intent to promote the teaching of basic computer science in schools and developing countries.[3][4][5] The original Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi 2 are manufactured in several board configurations through licensed manufacturing agreements with Newark element14 (Premier Farnell), RS Components and Egoman.[6] The hardware is the same across all manufacturers. The firmware is closed-source.[7]
Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B) spec:
The Raspberry Pi 3 is the third generation Raspberry Pi. It replaced the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B in February 2016:
- A 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU
- 802.11n Wireless LAN
- Bluetooth 4.1
- Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)
Like the Pi 2, it also has:
- 1GB RAM
- 4 USB ports
- 40 GPIO pins
- Full HDMI port
- Ethernet port
- Combined 3.5mm audio jack and composite video
- Camera interface (CSI)
- Display interface (DSI)
- Micro SD card slot (now push-pull rather than push-push)
- VideoCore IV 3D graphics core
All this for only $35 USD, what a bargain!
There are 100s of DIY projects out in the wild but the popular ones are:
- Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center, or OpenELEC for short, is a small Linux distribution built for running a complete media center. It uses a media center called Kodi There is another one called LibreELEC.
- Another Open source alternative media center, OSMC.
- Standalone streaming music player for Spotify, Google Music, SoundCloud, Webradio, Podcasts and other music from the cloud.
- Build a Network Attached Storage (NAS) with OpenMediaVault, a fully-fledged file server to save your family photos, music and videos to a connected HDD, ready to share across your home network.
- RetroPie allows you to turn your Raspberry Pi into a retro-gaming machine.
- Recalbox, Another retro gaming machine with a few more nice features than Retropie.
- Ubuntu Mate, a popular linux distribution.
- Google will be releasing Android for RPi3 though at the moment, the Github project is empty. But if you can't wait, someone has already ported an unoffical version of Android 6 (usable but still rough around the edges). Can't wait to run Android TV soon...
- Run a web server on a Raspberry Pi
- Run your own pocket size Dropbox alternative called OwnCloud 9 for storing and sharing files.
- Raspberry Pi Access point. Great if you want to extend your Wifi connection or WiFi HotSpot. You could even install an OpenVPN server and use access point as your Virtual Private Network connection.
- Browse anonymously anywhere you go with the Onion Pi Tor proxy.
- Run and play Minecraft on Raspberry Pi.
- VNC server for remote desktop access.
This is just a very small selection of projects. There are other really cool projects to make your home smarter using IoT but you need the addons for Raspberry Pi. Take a look at some of the DIY project created using Window IoT for Raspberry Pi.
What other popular DIY project do you know of? i'll be interested to learn and try them out.
