10 Cool Things To Do With Your Raspberry Pi ⋆ Emerging Tech Mastery

On this episode, we wanted to take a little break from the usual information firehose and rabbit holes we are used to entering.

Instead, we wanted to cover some cool and fun things you can do with your Raspberry Pi.

After all, what fun is the tech if we aren’t doing interesting things for us personally?

10 Cool Things To Do With Your Raspberry Pi

Here’s our list of 10 cool things to do with your Raspberry Pi:

Create your own Media center (with a Netflix-like User Interface) – Programs like Kodi make this super simple and easy to do. Your task prior to this is organizing your media (music, movies etc) so they can be read and shown in the User Interface (UI) by the program.
Play Games – This could be old school video game emulators from our favorite consoles. However, our absolutely favorite are 90s point-and-click adventure games with pixel art graphics. Keep in mind the Pi doesn’t have powerful GPUs, so you’ll have to limit performance to more modest game requirements.
Make it into a Camera – We have talked about the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera module before, but you can also get the regular module, which we’ve seen run on a Pi Zero, and the video looked fantastic (especially for that tiny thing). You can also hook up a webcam.
Learn how to hack (ethically of course) – Our friend Frank, who has been on the show, recently told us about installing Kali Linux, a commonly used Linux distribution for hacker training. Also, sand-boxing yourself in the Pi while you tinker is a fairly safe way to go explore the unknown.
Control other devices and micro-controllers – This is literally a life’s work where you could spent eternity playing around. The cool part is that the sky’s the limit with what you can do once you start connecting these devices. You could be an industrial maker factory, a simple science project prototyping electronics, or anything in between.
Create your own home-brew PBX corporate phone system – Yep, just the ones at the office, except at your place. It’s pretty incredible that with a few programs, your Raspberry Pi can be transformed in to a common corporate communication tool.
Create your own persistent local data storage or Network Attached Storage (NAS) – This is a super practical and helpful way to operate locally with you data. Internet and network access optional, as you can simply plug your hard drive into the Pi.
Create your own website on the dark net – Yep, that might sound crazy but you can do it pretty easily. With some simple instructions (hat tip, to Network Chuck), you can have you very own hidden website only accessible by a Tor-enabled browser.
Mine Monero Cryptocurrency – While this won’t be anywhere near a profitable endeavor, it’s great for learning. Considering the massive firepower most successful miner’s have, this is a pretty cool and unique thing to do with just a Pi.
Create your own closed circuit security camera – If you followed #3 you have opened up a lot of value and possibilities with capturing video. One of those possibilities is creating your own security camera that you can program and customize.

Bonus #11: Use it to record podcasts, write and publish on your website – We have a Blue Yeti Microphone hooked up to a Pi 4 B via USB and use Audacity to edit and post produce shows. We also use Libre Office or good ole notepad for writing. You can then easily login on a browser to WordPress to publish.

Well, that’s our 10 11, but we will come up with more cool and fun projects future posts.

Happy Pi adventures!

~Aaron