Beyond PiHole: Creative Raspberry Pi Projects for Home, Network, and More
The versatility of Raspberry Pi devices shines through a wide array of personal and specialized projects, from enhancing home networks to critical marine applications. Users consistently find creative ways to deploy these small computers, often leveraging their low power consumption and GPIO capabilities.
Enhancing Home Networks and Automation
Many enthusiasts build robust home automation and network infrastructure around their Pis. A common setup involves running Home Assistant, often augmented with a reverse proxy, AdGuard for network-wide ad blocking, and Tailscale for secure remote access. Other critical network services include using a Pi as an LTE to WiFi gateway, setting up a local DHCP server, implementing caching DNS with filtering, and hosting an MQTT server for IoT device communication. For secure remote connectivity, some deploy an OpenVPN server. The ever-popular PiHole remains a staple for network-level ad and tracker blocking.
Monitoring, Control, and Specialized Hardware
Raspberry Pis excel at monitoring and control tasks. They serve as Duet web servers for 3D printers and cncjs for CNC mills, providing web-based interfaces for managing these machines. For aviation enthusiasts, Pis become ADSB (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) monitors using software like adsb-lol, often paired with RTL-SDR sticks to track aircraft. Similarly, rtl_433 monitors are used with SDR sticks to capture data from 433 MHz and 915 MHz wireless sensors, and dedicated ADS-B 1090 monitors track specific aviation frequencies.
Environmental sensing is another strong suit, with Pis powering Pimoroni Enviro+ devices for indoor air quality monitoring or even acting as simple flood monitors in basements, sometimes even with original Pi1 models. In marine environments, Pis take on crucial roles, running boat navigation systems with Signal K and connecting to instruments via NMEA2000 HATs, serving as a boat NAS, or powering dedicated info displays on the nav table.
Entertainment and Novelty Projects
Beyond utility, Raspberry Pis are central to numerous entertainment and hobby projects. Retro gaming setups with RetroPie on older models like the Pi 3B+ are popular, as are LibreELEC installations for turning Pis (e.g., Pi 4) into dedicated Plex clients for media consumption. Some users even take on more unique challenges, such as emulating an old Macintosh on a Pi 3. For a multi-room audio experience, Pis with HifiBerry HATs can act as SnapCast clients, creating a "poor man's Sonos system."
A particularly interesting novelty project is the GPS-based NTP server. While often considered a "cool way to waste some time," it offers practical value by providing millisecond-accurate timing throughout a local network, leveraging tools like Chrony and GPS HATs.
Hardware Considerations and Tips
Several practical tips emerge from these projects. For a cleaner, more integrated setup, using a PoE (Power over Ethernet) shield is highly recommended, especially for devices like a Home Assistant server, simplifying power delivery. While newer Pis (like the CM4 or Pi 5) are excellent as aarch64 dev platforms, many users highlight that older Pi models (Pi1, Pi2, Pi3) remain perfectly capable for less demanding tasks like flood monitoring or retro gaming, extending their useful life.
A recurring sentiment is concern over the current price point of new Raspberry Pis. While their unique combination of GPIO and form factor is invaluable for specific projects requiring shields and direct I/O, for more compute-intensive self-hosting tasks that don't need these specific features (like a Kubernetes cluster, which some found too slow on Pi 3s due to memory limits), sourcing cheap, off-lease computers can be a more cost-effective and powerful alternative. This suggests a careful consideration of project requirements versus hardware capabilities and cost.