Raspberry Pi First Project

[RadoBeast]

Hi, so I am planning to buy a Raspberry Pi 3 very soon and I am wondering what I could do with it for a easy beginner project. I've looked around online what you can do with it and I don't really see how some things are that practical for my use. Does anyone know any cool and easy project that I would be able to make around the house and actually be able to use it? Or I'm just looking for something easy to do as a beginner which I will actually find a use for. Anything would work for me.

[manikyath]

well.. a livestreamer recently turned one into a retro gaming thingy he now uses to livestream NES/SNES games, that's always a fun project to do  (pi3 should gladly emulate PSX, and manage N64) 

 

beyond that, they make okay tiny media centers

[Sauron]

Something pretty easy would be installing kodi and using it as a media center. Or using it as an emulator as already pointed out.

 

People have also built some pretty cool mini-laptop / handhelds with pis, although you'd need to buy some accessories like a screen and a small keyboard.

[Meag]

9 minutes ago, RadoBeast said:

Hi, so I am planning to buy a Raspberry Pi 3 very soon and I am wondering what I could do with it for a easy beginner project. I've looked around online what you can do with it and I don't really see how some things are that practical for my use. Does anyone know any cool and easy project that I would be able to make around the house and actually be able to use it? Or I'm just looking for something easy to do as a beginner which I will actually find a use for. Anything would work for me.

I would say install retro pie on it, if you enjoy retro gaming. It can emulate a large variety of different games form NES to N64. Also you could try using it as a mini media centre, or even a portable console if you want to buy stuff like a touch screen and battery for it. I have done all these projects my self and they are pretty easy and fun to do!

[J. Hammond]

Start with Pi-Hole, it turns your Pi into a wifi hotspot that automatically blocks advertisements so that anything connected to it won't see any ads. It doesn't require anything more than the Pi and an Ethernet cable. 

[Daniel22]

38 minutes ago, RadoBeast said:

Hi, so I am planning to buy a Raspberry Pi 3 very soon and I am wondering what I could do with it for a easy beginner project. I've looked around online what you can do with it and I don't really see how some things are that practical for my use. Does anyone know any cool and easy project that I would be able to make around the house and actually be able to use it? Or I'm just looking for something easy to do as a beginner which I will actually find a use for. Anything would work for me.

I'm new to the pi myself, I've been planning on making it into a mini tablet, just buy a case and screen then download your operating system of choice

[dany_boy]

I did a DIY nvidia shield. Moonlight embeded allows you to stream from your PC to a TV with controller and keyboard/mouse support. Worked like a charm

[Mooshe]

If you're looking for IoT type of things, there's quite a lot you can do with a Raspberry Pi, the only limit is your imagination (and the hardware). One of my favorite projects is the Magic Mirror. Check out the official Raspberry Pi blog for a bunch of neat little projects.

 

Personally, I use my raspberry pi as a media center, as I don't have any other use for it in the moment. When the next raspberry pi comes out though I will gladly recycle it into a more useful project.

 

3 hours ago, manikyath said:

well.. a livestreamer recently turned one into a retro gaming thingy he now uses to livestream NES/SNES games, that's always a fun project to do  (pi3 should gladly emulate PSX, and manage N64) 

 

beyond that, they make okay tiny media centers

A lot of N64 games do not manage well on the Raspberry Pi 3, and some games work better for different emulators, so you may need to fiddle with it to get it to work. As far as I know, anything newer than the PS1 will straight out not work due to hardware limitations.

[manikyath]

1 hour ago, Mooshe said:

A lot of N64 games do not manage well on the Raspberry Pi 3, and some games work better for different emulators, so you may need to fiddle with it to get it to work. As far as I know, anything newer than the PS1 will straight out not work due to hardware limitations.

my pi2 almost managed N64, you just need to bump up the GPU clock as high a the chip will happily run, that makes a HUGE difference in performance in some cases (GPU clock also controls L2 cache)

[njmyers3]

5 hours ago, dany_boy said:

I did a DIY nvidia shield. Moonlight embeded allows you to stream from your PC to a TV with controller and keyboard/mouse support. Worked like a charm

I also used Moonlight on my Raspberry Pi, but I made mine completely portable.

 

You can power a Raspberry Pi with a power bank, and although Wi-Fi isn't the most reliable, it's playable for non competitive games. I'd recommend doing this if you don't have a specific use for it. The Steam Link is better, but this is cheaper and completely portable.

 

I'd also recommend making a retro gaming and emulation station, but I'm not really into many retro games, I like realistic graphics.

[Ronin64]

The first thing I did was make a 3DS HomePass relay. It lets you streetpass with people over the internet instead of walking pass them in the real world, which is really nice for me since I live in a remote area.

Also I have Resilio Sync server running that will sync certain folders on my two pcs to a 1TB hard drive attached to my pi. Bascily its a personal DropBox, although this took me awhile to setup and was quite difficult, for me anyway. So may not be right for a first project.

 

*Edit*

Also if you want to use your Pi for more than one thing, you can use BerryBoot.

I have Resilio Sync running at all times except when I want to use Kodi or RetroPi, I will reboot the Pi and just boot in something else. This is much more convenient than swapping SD cards, if you only have one Pi of course.