Ten pi-fect projects for your new Raspberry Pi
Set the cig-pack sized micro to work doing something useful
Feature There was an article a while back, in Scientific American I think, that posed the question: given a super-powerful computer, with infinite computing power shoe-horned into a coke can, what would you do with it?*
The arrival of the Raspberry Pi (RPi) prompted a similar sort of question: given an (almost) disposable PC with late-1990s power, what would you do with it? Other than, of course, to use it as a cheap media centre.
Yes, yes, we all know it supposed purpose is to teach kids to code, but I mean, come on, where's the fun in that? If the target audience are anything like my two iPod junkies, then just learning to writing code is only going to interest the tiniest minority. Thankfully, it turns out that there's quite a lot you can do with your RPi. Which is important, because your average Linux head isn't going to persuade ten year olds to start pootling around with Scratch. But if a £29 PC is merely the gateway to doing other more exciting STUFF, then they may have to learn some coding to get it all to work.
In their defence, the average(?) Linux head is inured in a culture of solving common problems, talking about them in forums, and posting fairly detailed workthroughs. What's more interesting is seeing the crossover between Linux heads, open source electronicistas and a wide range of niche hobbyists. RPi is seeing action with groups from Apiarists (do you know the current state of your hive?) to Xenophiles (SETI, anyone?). Yachtsmen and Zumba DJs take note.
There's a large amount of overlap between the elements within projects, so starting with a web server will get you on the road to a weather station and so on. But let's not give the game away just yet. Here then, is a collection of useful and perhaps fun RPi projects which range in difficulty from plugging in some wire and downloading a bit of code, to firing up a soldering iron and whipping out the carpentry set.
Well, what are you waiting for?
Coffee table arcade game
Nostalgia alert! When I was 12, my best friend's grandfather owned a pub. In those pre-Sunday Licensing days, we could sneak in early, he would stick some free credits on for us, and three of us would have a quick Space Invaders tournament. How technology has moved on.
Source: Graham Gelding/El Reg
Difficulty Level (1-10)
4 - some fairly basic carpentry and wee bit of soldering
Extra cost
Under £100
Shopping List
LCD display, joystick, buttons, prototyping board, resistors, table
Approach
Mount an LCD screen into an old table, hook it up to your RPi. Get hold of an off-the-shelf arcade joystick and some arcade buttons, and with the judicious use some resistors as voltage dividers to tie them to the GPIO inputs on the RPi. Install (or compile) a copy of advanced MAME, and some choice games.
Take it further
Hook up two sets of controls for two-player games, add some sound with an amp and some speakers.
Online Help
This is a popular meme, so there are lots of workthroughs and examples out there, including some IKEA modders. If you're not sure you want all the fuss, these chaps have some more expensive options available.
LAMP server
Yup, you can easily build a web server on an RPi. Why would you want to? As a first project, it's good practice, and novices will learn a heap of stuff: downloading and compiling source, Linux command line tools, configuration etc. For the rest, well, for a headless web-app server, an RPi may be all you need. Or use it as a test server, or for hosting a blog. It's also forms the basis for some other types of projects (see below), where having a web page that can display data from the RPi's GPIO inputs is half the battle.
Difficulty Level (1-10)
3 - but varies: bog-standard compiling and HTML coding, plus MySQL and PHP if you want
Extra cost
Zero
Shopping List
None (although if you're needing an excuse for a decent router upgrade...)
Approach
There are precompiled SD card images out there for various flavours of RPi Linux, but half the fun will be getting it running from scratch.
Take it further
See some of the other projects below. But how about adding wireless and solar-power?
Online Help
Oh, yes. Oodles. But a novice's best bet is probably to stick to the forums initially.
* The best answer, IMHO, was the one which pointed out that those pesky laws of thermodynamics implied what you really had was a very large bomb... [See Pickover, C. (1991) An informal survey on the scientific and social impact of a soda can-sized super-super computer. Computers in Physics, May/June 5(3) 290-301]
Next page: Pi/Kindle Chimera
COMMENTS
Re: Is that it? @Jason
I get the impression you are a glass half empty type of guy. If you had spent more than 3 seconds thinking about this, you would have realised that these are just some of the projects you can do. It's not an exhaustive list! Yes, you probably could do some of them using a cheap PC, but GPIO would be a problem, as would power consumption and size.
I suggest Google, and some thought.
My project...
At the moment, I'm working on a rPI intelligent thermostat. The rPI is going to be attached to the wall next to the boiler and will handle the mains switching to switch the boiler on and off.
The thermostat itself is an Arduino with an LCD display, telling you the temp and when it's next going to switch on, also the target temp. The temperature sensing is done with an LM35 temperature sensor, at the moment it's all hooked up with USB/Serial ports (and not to the boiler, yet) but will use xbee.
The rPi runs a mysql database and the system as a whole will allow rules based heating configured from web or the thermostat, such as:
On for an hour, on all day, off for a week, minimum house temperature (frost protection), daily scheduling etc. I'll be storing all the temperatures in a database and hoping to use this more intelligently in future...
Wife acceptable
I have set up RasPBX on a Pi at home. I initially used the SPA3102 but could not get rid of the echo so I changed to an OBi110 which at about 35GBP is cheaper and much better. Now voicemails are attached to e-mails instead of hiding behind 1571, we can divert international calls straight to voicemail (as they are pretty much all nuisance sales calls) and with an additional Sipgate trunk and some Zopier soft phones we can have multiple simultaneous phone calls. Amazing for a little toy computer.
Pi-BX looks like a great little project.
My only obstacles to little projects are wife based.
Re: Is that it? @Jason
PCs are typically small or cheap but not both. The PI takes both to a new level. It's like an AppleTV or Roku in this regard. You can try to make PCs smaller but then you end up with a $1000 Steam Box or a Mac Mini. It's also nice that the PI achieves it's cheapness without being some ancient thing you retrieved from a dumpster.
Who wants their cool project to fail because it's made of parts that finally decided to die of old age?
