The Top 5 Raspberry Pi projects

Raspberry Pi 2 projects

Single-board microcomputers such as the Raspberry Pi 2 are making it cheaper and easier than ever to learn about computers. Perfect for teaching children about coding from an early age, the Raspberry Pi 2 can also be used for a range of interesting and educational tech projects.

Whether it’s creating your own radio station, building a download hub or making a media centre for your TV, you can do it with the Raspberry Pi 2. If you’ve recently picked up one of the microcomputers, here’s a list of Top 5 rewarding projects to sink your teeth into.

1. Raspberry Pi projects: Create a wireless extender

Nothing highlights the versatility of a Raspberry Pi quite like this project (other than the Gameboy below). With an USB Wi-Fi dongle, a microSD card and the Rapsberry Pi itself, you increase the reach of your wireless signal.

Guy Eastwood has created the excellent Pi-Point website, which takes you through everything you need to know about this project. Follow the link and you'll find detailed documentation and free downloadable images to help you.

2. Raspberry Pi projects: Make a Gameboy

No, seriously. This is a legitimate and doable project for the more advanced user. In terms of the actual coding, it isn't the most challenging; you're essentially installing an emulator on your Raspberry Pi. The actual hard work comes in the form of soldering the different pieces together.

Travis Brown, over at XodusTech has produced a detailed log of how he brought back to life his Gameboy using a Raspberry Pi.

The best thing about creating a Pi-Pocket (as he calls it) is that you're not limited to playing only Gameboy games on it; the Pi-Pocket is also capable of playing NES, Sega Master System, Game Gear games as well as popular Linux-based titles such as Doom and Duke Nukem.

3. Raspberry Pi projects: Home Arcade Box 

While it isn't powerful enough to run many modern games, some enterprising tech-heads have twigged that the Pi is just about perfect on which to play emulators. Emulators, for those of you not in the know, are programs that allow you to play titles from older, outdated consoles such as the SNES, the Sega Genesis and even the original PlayStation on PC using freely available ROMs.

While you can run most of these emulators from the standard Raspbian OS, the guys over at RetroPie have dedicated a huge amount of time to building a custom disk image that will do almost all the work for you, and allow you to select and start your chosen emulator with nothing more than a USB gamepad.

The legal catch is that you need to own a physical copy of the games, or it's piracy. So that means on no account should you use this as an opportunity to play all those SNES games that your mum wouldn't buy you back in 1991.

4. Raspberry Pi projects: Media centre for your TV

Setting up a Raspberry Pi as your home media centre might be the perfect project. By hooking it up to your TV via HDMI, you can get all your media in your living room without having to fork out for Apple TV via Pocket Wifi. Specific operating systems such as RasPlex and RaspbMC (based on the Plex and XBMC frameworks respectively) have even been built in order to make it as easy as possible to get you started.

These systems can access remote media stored in other locations - provided you're connected to Wi-Fi  via Pocket Wifi  and are controllable through remote apps on your smartphone; they can even directly access services such as Netflix and Hulu to stream content to you. It combines all the functionality of a bulky, expensive media setup in a tiny form factor at a ridiculously affordable price, and we can't get enough of it. We've even written a tutorial on how to turn your Raspberry Pi into a home media centre.

5. Raspberry Pi projects: Wirelessly control your stereo

Advances in audio technology are making it increasingly easy to take your tunes with you everywhere you go. For aspiring audiophiles on a budget, the Raspberry Pi can help you realise your Hi-Fi dreams with a minimum of fuss, using it as a music server in a similar way to the media centres described above.


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