People use Raspberry Pi for a variety of things. Are there any uses that particularly intrigue you?

Recently, I heard someone say in a conference call that the open-source community is a blend of curiosity and problem-solving culture. Curiosity is the foundation of our problem solving. When tackling problems of various scales, we utilize a plethora of open-source tools, including running Linux on the incredibly convenient Raspberry Pi.

We all have different life experiences, so I asked our author community about the most peculiar uses of Raspberry Pi they have encountered. I have a feeling these amazing builds will inspire others.

Experimenting with Raspberry Pi

For me, Raspberry Pi is a fantastic tool for adding extra development resources to my home network. If I want to create a new website or try out a new software tool, I don’t have to burden my desktop Linux machine with a bunch of packages that I might only use once during experimentation. Instead, I can set it up on my Raspberry Pi.

If I think I’m going to do something adventurous, I use a backup boot environment. I have two microSD cards, so I can insert one card into the Raspberry Pi while setting up the second card for any experiments I want to conduct. The extra microSD card is not expensive, but it saves a lot of time when I want to experiment on a second image. Just shut down, swap the microSD card, and restart to immediately work on a dedicated testing system.

When I’m not experimenting, my Raspberry Pi serves as a print server, connecting my non-WiFi printer to the home network. It also acts as a convenient SSH file server for quick backups of important files.

— Jim Hall

The Popularity of Raspberry Pi

The most surprising thing I’ve seen about Raspberry Pi is that it popularized and mainstreamed the concept of small single-board computers, making them truly usable for the masses.

Before Raspberry Pi, we had similar small single-board computers, but they were often niche, expensive, and software-wise off-putting. Raspberry Pi is affordable, cheap enough that anyone can easily obtain one for a project (not considering the current availability issues). Once it became affordable, people overcame software challenges to make it good enough to solve many basic computing tasks, even allowing a full-fledged computer to be used for specific tasks, not just microcontrollers.

We have a plethora of good, relatively inexpensive single-board computers that have facilitated various debugging, playing, and experimentation. People are willing to try new ideas, even driving more hobbyist hardware development to support these ideas.

Honestly, this is the most amazing and radical thing I’ve seen from Raspberry Pi: it fundamentally changed people’s perception of computing, especially in areas where Raspberry Pi excels, and not only spawned its own ecosystem but also countless other diverse ecosystems.

— John ‘Warthog9′ Hawley

Raspberry Pi for Beekeeping

In 2018, my brother and I kept a few beehives and used Raspberry Pi and various sensors to monitor the temperature and humidity of the hives. We also planned to implement hive scales in the summer to observe honey production and measure the weight in winter to see if the bees had enough food. However, we ultimately did not implement this plan.

Our small monitoring solution was based on Raspberry Pi 2B, running Raspbian Stretch (based on Debian 9), and connected to a temperature and humidity sensor (DHT11). We had three to four of these sensors inside the hive to measure the temperature at the entrance hole, below the lid, and at the bottom frame. We directly connected the sensors to the Raspberry Pi and used the Python_DHT sensor library to read the data. We also set up InfluxDB, Telegraf, and ultimately set up Grafana to visualize the data.

If you want to learn more about our setup, we published an article about our small monitoring solution in Linux Magazine.

— Heike Jurzik

Retro Computing with Raspberry Pi

I hope to create a project using Raspberry Pi to simulate how to program machine language into old computers using “switches and lights”. Using the GPIO pins of Raspberry Pi, this seems quite simple. For example, they demonstrate how to control LEDs with GPIO switches or use buttons for input in their online manuals. I believe that with just a few LEDs and switches, along with a small program running on the Raspberry Pi, I can simulate old computers. However, I lack the spare time to engage in such a project, which is why I wrote Toy CPU to simulate it.

— Jim Hall

Making Toys with Raspberry Pi

When my daughter was four, she asked for a “Jaws Music Box” for Christmas. She could perfectly envision it in her mind. It would be pink, sparkly, and have her name on it. When she opened the box, it would play the theme song from the popular movie. She could put Jaws and other treasures inside the box. After searching online and in stores everywhere, I found nothing that could compare to her imagination. So my husband and I decided to make one ourselves in our own toy shop (which is his home office). And at the core of it all, of course, was Raspberry Pi. He used a light sensor and Python script to make the music play at the right moment. We carefully placed the tech gear at the bottom of the music box and decorated it according to her taste. That year, open-source technology made the Christmas magic possible!

— Lauren Pritchett

(Cover image: MJ/aa8f1412-0f1d-4780-99db-22d6522010b7)