Looking for something to do with a Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi Zero? These easy and practical projects are good for all levels, even beginners. Streaming. Gaming. Networking. Even printing!
The Raspberry Pi single-board computer and all its variants have captured the imaginations of DIY enthusiasts and budding hobbyists alike. And now that the price of the 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 has been slashed to $35 and an 8GB model with as much RAM as a Mac Mini is here, interest in building with the board is sure to spike. Much of the coverage you’ll see around the web focuses on the more fantastical projects —magic mirrors, portable gaming handhelds, intelligent drones, and so forth. And for good reason! Those maker masterpieces show what sort of power the $35 mini-PC is capable of in the hands of someone with a little imagination and a bin full of spare electronics, especially now that the Raspberry Pi 4 includes more RAM, a huge CPU upgrade, USB-C charging, and enough graphics horsepower to drive a pair of 4K monitors simultaneously. But most people, particularly beginners, won’t use the Raspberry Pi to whip up crazy creations. There are near-endless practical uses for this bare-bones kit, from media streaming to extending the range of your Wi-Fi network, as the following 10 projects demonstrate. Time to put that $35 computer to real work. Heck, many of these will work just fine even on the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero. Editor’s note: This article is updated periodically to include new info, most recently to resurface these projects for Pi day (3/14). The original $35 Raspberry Pi may have been revolutionary to makers, but it took off with PC enthusiasts as well thanks to its ability to double as a dirt-cheap home-theater PC. That allure may have waned a bit in recent years as dedicated devices like the Chromecast hit the streets at similarly low prices, but using a Raspberry Pi as a media-streaming box still offers far more power than those streaming-centric sticks, especially if you have a sizeable local media collection. There are a slew of HTPC-centric Raspberry Pi operating systems out there, each revolving around slapping your HD videos on the big screen. OSMC and OpenElec are two such choices built around the popular Kodi media center software (formerly XBMC), while RasPlex transforms your Pi into the ultimate Plex streaming box. The $21 Raspberry Pi TV Hat accessory, meanwhile, can grant your mini-PC the ability to read over-the-air TV signals. Likewise, if you have a dumb TV that you’d like to add web browsing and other basic computing abilities to, the Raspberry Pi does the trick without costing anywhere near as much as a Chromebit or Windows-powered Compute Stick.
