Recently, I heard someone on a conference call say that the open source community is a combination of curiosity and a culture of problem-solving. Curiosity is the basis of our problem solving. When solving problems of all sizes, we use a wide range of open source tools, including Linux running on the incredibly convenient Raspberry Pi.
Because each of our life experiences are unique, I asked our community of authors about the most unusual Raspberry Pi uses they’ve come across. I have a feeling these amazing builds will inspire others.
To me, the Raspberry Pi is a great tool for adding additional 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 clutter my desktop Linux machine with a bunch of packages that I may only use once while experimenting. Instead, I'll set it up on my Raspberry Pi.
If I think I'm going to do something risky, I'll use a backup boot environment. With two microSD cards, I can plug one card into the Raspberry Pi and use the second card simultaneously for any experiment I want. While it wouldn't cost much to purchase an additional microSD card, it would save a lot of time when I want to do a second mirroring experiment. Just a simple operation, shut down and replace the microSD card, restart and you can start using the dedicated test system immediately.
My Raspberry Pi acts as a print server, connecting my non-WiFi printer to my home network when I'm not experimenting. This SSH file server is very convenient and helps me quickly back up important files.
— Jim Hall
The most surprising thing I’ve seen about the Raspberry Pi is that it makes small single The concept of tablet computers became popular and popularized, making it truly practical for the masses.
Before the Raspberry Pi, we had similar small single-board computers, but they tended to be niche, expensive, and prohibitive from a software perspective. No matter how difficult it is to obtain right now, the Raspberry Pi is so affordable that anyone can easily get one for a project. Once it became cheap, people would overcome the software challenges to make it good enough to solve many basic computing tasks, and even use a full real computer for a specific task, not just a microcontroller.
We have an abundance of good, relatively inexpensive small single-board computers, which facilitates all kinds of debugging, playing, and experimentation. People were willing to try new ideas, and there was even a push for more hobbyist hardware development to support those ideas.
Honestly, this is the most amazing and radical thing I’ve seen from the Raspberry Pi: it fundamentally changes people’s perception of computing, especially in the areas the Raspberry Pi excels in, Not only has it spawned its own ecosystem, it has now spawned countless other diverse ecosystems.
My brother and I held a beehive breeding project in 2018, using trees Raspberry Pi and various sensors monitor beehive temperature and humidity. We also plan to implement a beehive scale in the summer to observe the honey production of the bees, and measure the weight in the winter to see if the bees have enough food. However, we ultimately did not implement this plan.
Our small monitoring solution is based on a Raspberry Pi 2B, running Raspbian Stretch (based on Debian 9), with a temperature and humidity sensor (DHT11) connected. Inside the hive we have three to four of these sensors measuring the temperature at the entrance hole of the hive, under the lid and on the lowest frame. We connect the sensor directly to the Raspberry Pi and read the data using the Python_DHT sensor library. We also built InfluxDB, Telegraf, and finally Grafana to visualize the data.
If you want to know more about our setup, we published an article about our small monitoring solution in Linux Magazine.
I am hoping to create a project using a Raspberry Pi that simulates how to program machine language into an old school computer using "switches and lights". This seems fairly simple using the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins. For example, their online manual shows how to use GPIO switches to turn an LED on or off, or use buttons for input. I figured just a few LEDs and switches, plus a small program running on a Raspberry Pi, would be enough to emulate an old computer. However, I lack free time to work on such a project, that's why I wrote Toy CPU to simulate it.
— Jim Hall
When my daughter was four years old, she asked to get her one for Christmas "Megalodon Music Box". She could picture it perfectly in her mind. It would be pink and sparkly, with her name on it. When she opens the box, the theme song from the hit movie plays. She can keep the Megalodon and other treasures in the box. After searching everywhere online and in stores, I found none that could match her vision. So my husband and I decided to make a DIY toy store in his home office. And at the heart of it all, of course, is the Raspberry Pi. He uses light sensors and Python scripts to automatically play music at the right time. Based on her aesthetic, we carefully placed the technology equipment at the bottom of the music box and decorated it. That year, open source technology made Christmas magic possible!
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