So you have a spare Raspberry pi? No? Still waiting for yours? Yeah… a friend of mine ordered his from RS, and they were taking forever. So he found another supplier who had some in stock… so he ordered it! And eventually he’ll receive the RS one as well which means he’ll have a spare. Woo!
Here are some things one can do with it:
- Internet radio streamer. Peripherals: speaker, wifi module.
- Heating scheduler. Depending on how your heating is hooked up, you might be looking for plugs, servo motors, or other gadgetry to interface with the heating source.
- VoIP solution with wireless headset. Internet connectivity, figuring out how to install google talk / skype / VoIP of choice on the thing, and connecting it to a headset (wifi? bluetooth? -oh, another adaptor then- some other tech?)
- YAMS: Yet Another Media Server. Peripherals: screen & speaker / tv.
- DYI NAS drive with two disks that mirror each other. Peripherals: 2 HDDs, 1 powered USB hub, and some special code to run the sync. Enable UPnP on it while you’re at it, so you can be guaranteed to be able to watch Indiana Jones and the temple of doom on your iPad in bed. (that heart-plucking scene right before bedtime gives you the nicest dream sequences)
- HAN Analytics aggregator – But you’ll need several little ploggs (or wifi-enabled telemetric plugs) to collect and broadcast the data, and then to write some code… perhaps… to collate and create visualisations of the data you’ve found. Could be interesting. Could be your fridge is sleep-walking.
- Lucky number 7: Alarm clock. Hook up a rack of LEDs, and write code to have them come on at a certain time of the morning, progressively, to simulate a psychedelic electro-dawn. As part of the setup, you could also write some lovely code so it can read out your newspaper’s headlines or latest tweets from a particular list. Ah. And the weather. It has to tell you the weather. Although of course why you wouldn’t revert to an old-school £2 radio, I have no idea…
- PiPr (Pi Printer) Message receiver / printer unit. Connect a thermal printer to it via raspberry pi breakout i/o board, and write code to allow it to receive messages from you (from an app? ftp? jabber? email? …) and print them. I’ll be building this for my parents for Christmas.
- …
I should’ve posted this when I started it, back in September…
Today I found this WAY cooler blog post with more than 40 pi projects which is from December. I wasn’t fast enough.
Hi Sophie, thanks for the link :) your blog looks awesome!