Raspberry Pi turns 10 today! That's right, we went from this little underpowered-but-lovable
Pi model B in 2012 all the way to this 100-times-faster Pi 4 model B a decade later.
And to celebrate, I'm gonna run through my 10 favorite
Pi projects! And I'd like to thank Red Shirt Jeff for letting me borrow his shirt today.
Starting at number 10, if you have a media library with songs, movies, and TV shows,
what better way to showcase it than by running OSMC, Kodi, or Plex?
These media libraries run great on the Pi, and you can play back all your media,
stream and record live TV, and enjoy music and apps, all running open source
software on your Pi. Drop the Apple TV or Chromecast, and pick up a Pi instead!
Number nine? A Pi cluster! I call mine the Bramble, and it's a set
of four Raspberry Pis I use to learn about Kubernetes, K3s, and distributed computing.
I've also built a cluster of Pis using four new Compute Module 4s on the Turing Pi 2,
and used it to see how the Raspberry Pi compares to the Top 500 supercomputers in the world—well,
at least in 1999.
And then I took that same cluster a hundred miles away and ran my website from my cousin's farm,
completely wireless, using a solar power and a 4G modem!
Pi clusters aren't faster than a modern desktop PC, but I've learned so much from building Pi clusters over
the years, I can't recommend it enough if you wanna learn about infrastructure and DevOps
with a cluster that fits in the palm of your hand.
Next up, at number 8, I spent a lotta time this year learning about 3G, 4G, and
5G modems with the Raspberry Pi. And I found out you can build your own mobile hotspot using a Pi.
Heck, there are even dedicated boards like this one from Waveshare that have multiple
network ports, WiFi, and a slot for a 4G or 5G modem, so you can build your
own router that's just as powerful as a $500 CradlePoint, using all open source software!
Check out my blog for an article on 4G LTE with the Pi, and subscribe to this channel,
because I'm gonna cover more on wireless on the Pi soon!
Going along with the theme of remote access, number 7 is the second most
useful addition I made to my homelab: a VPN. And not one of those silly VPNs you hear
other YouTubers advertise every day. No this VPN is completely under your control.
I'm talking about PiVPN—it's the easiest way to set up your own little in-home Wireguard VPN,
giving you access to whatever else you have on your home network,
like a NAS or Pi-Hole, for complete privacy.
It's a little more advanced and not everyone needs one, but if you do,
this is a great free and open source solution, and runs perfectly on a Raspberry Pi.
Speaking of NASes, for number 6, the Pi isn't the fastest NAS out there, but
install OpenMediaVault or NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi, and you can set it up to be
a great little gigabit NAS to store all your media library, photos, music, and documents.
I talked a lot about Pi NASes last year, from the Radxa Taco to the Axzez Interceptor,
both with five SATA drives. I even built this ridiculous five-thousand-dollar
48 terabyte all-SSD NAS with the Taco!
The Pi's processor holds it back from competing with a modern Synology, QNAP,
or ASUSTOR NAS, but it works great if you just
have a gigabit network and don't need to do crazy things like transcode 4K video.
The Pi is plenty fast to run as a home automation hub, however,
and that's why I put this on my list at number 5. Last month,
I set up Home Assistant's new Yellow automation hub. It uses a Compute Module 4 and NVMe storage,
has built-in Zigbee and Power over Ethernet, and you can easilly add a Z-wave radio.
It's a great little unit and I've already automated half of this office using it.
You can do some amazing things with systems like Home Assistant and openHAB,
and they both run great on a Pi 4, or even a Pi 3 B+.
But what if you don't have one of these newer Pis? Even
older Pis can do number 4 on my list—you can use your Pi as a camera!
There are tons of different cameras you can use with the Pi,
from the tiny Pi Camera v2 that fits into this little Pi Zero case,
to the HQ camera with it's bigger image sensor and interchangeable lenses.
There's even an autofocus camera from Arducam now, and I reviewed it earlier this year.
But hardware is only part of the equation—what makes cameras on the Pi
really powerful is the software. From using Python to build a custom timelapse setup, to running
MotionEye or TensorFlow to build a surveillance camera or smart doorbell, the Pi has you covered.
And if you're in a pinch, you can even use showmecam and turn a Pi into a USB webcam!
Next up on the list is related but much more expansive. Number 3 is environment monitoring.
I already display local weather and some information from my home's air
quality monitors on my Raspberry Pi dashboards.
But did you know there's a Raspberry Pi system for seismic monitoring?
And Raspberry Pi also introduced the Pico last year, a microcontroller that's great
for building into remote sensors for all kinds of different monitoring.
This year I'm gonna monitor even more things,
like power and earthquakes, so subscribe if you wanna see it!
Now we're getting to it—number two on the list is probably one of the must fun
and entertaining uses for a Raspberry Pi. Retro gaming!
Ever since the Pi Zero and Compute Module 4 came out, Raspberry Pis have been integrated
into all kinds of amazing gaming rigs, from tabletop arcades to Gameboy-style cases.
Heck, the Pico even gets in on the action,
with Pimoroni's Picosystem being a tiny retro handheld with a 1.5" display.
The Pi 4 is powerful enough to emulate PSP, Nintendo 64,
and Sega Dreamcast games, and anything older than that. And
there are hundreds of different cases and boards that will trigger your nostalgia,
from the NESPi to this Null 2 handheld, which I built in a video last year, linked below.
And finally we've come to it. The number one Pi project I recommend to
anyone and everyone is to set one up as a Pi-hole.
Pi-hole is a network-wide ad blocker that does more than just block ads. And
no, unlike some people, I don't equate ad blocking with piracy.
Hey! There's a shirt for that... Red Shirt Jeff.com.
All kidding aside, I tend to think of ad-blocking more as a way to retaliate
against a horrible disease that plagues most of the Internet today.
And I know it, more than most. I used to work with a few of the largest media companies in America.
There was a constant push to add more and more tracking and personalized ads
in their apps and websites, and I fought hard against it...but it was an impossible task.
You'd be amazed at how much most large companies know about you based on your browsing history,
your social media use, and what you watch across all these major platforms.
Ad and tracking blockers like Pi-hole help you
fight back against tracking and personalization across the web.
And before you go in the comments talking about how I'm destroying creator's lives by
not watching ads, I pay for YouTube Premium. I subscribe to a number of sites I read.
I directly sponsor a number of creators on Patreon and GitHub Sponsors. And you should do the same!
Don't assume that people who use ad-blockers just want to leech content for free off the Internet.
Besides ad and tracker blocking, Pi-hole also gives you control over your own DNS.
A lot of shady ISPs even share your private browsing history with advertisers,
but if you take control of your own local DNS with Pi-hole, you can avoid that problem.
Finally, the built-in local DNS that Pi-hole provides makes it easier to grow your own little
homelab. Instead of trying to remember random IP addresses, you can assign names to servers. Like
I have my little geerli.net server here, and I can even access this UPS at ups01.geerli.net!
And what if you're not at home? Well,
just log into your PiVPN and you can get that same protection wherever you are in the world.
Well, assuming you can reach your home Internet. And that you can keep it secure.
Don't worry, more videos on all that are coming later this year.
So subscribe! And happy birthday to Raspberry Pi! Until next time, I'm Jeff Geerling.