Perusing my twitter stream last night I noticed that Wesley Crusher Wil Wheaton has found himself in the possession of a Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Like any self respecting human in the digital age, he did the next logical thing. He asked the masses what the heck he should do with his shiny new toys. No doubt, he’s going to get 5 million tweet replies that he should install Retropie and play old video games because, well, obviously that’s what he should do.
Instead of replying to him, I thought I would share 5 projects that we, the Editors of Make:, all discussed when the topic came up… aside from the fact that we all went weak in the knees when we saw he name-dropped us.
Touch the screen and step back. The raspberry pi will capture your photo and do various things with it, like tweet it. Slap that sucker in an interesting enclosure of your choice. A giant camera is a good choice, but we’ve also seen some cool alternatives.
You can turn your Raspberry Pi into a tiny radio station so easy that its worth doing just to say you’ve done it. Seriously Wil, do it. Your friends will think you’re a magician.
Questionably legal drone disabler/ wifi jammer
You can totally use that Raspberry Pi to jam 802.11 wifi. It is illegal to jam other people’s signal though, so maybe just set it up in your own home to learn about how it is done, crash a few wifi controlled drones, and then brag about it. You know you want to, you already feel a little bit cooler after even reading this.
Anonymous browsing with Raspberry Pi
Put that Pi in between you and the internet to force anonymity.
Get your hands on the Raspberry Pi camera and a display to turn some binoculars or a telescope into a futuristic computer display. Not only can you pipe the live feed through the screen, you could add all kinds of graphics and other sensor data to make you feel like you’re in a movie, if that’s what you’re into.
There you go Wil. Have fun with that little piece of the future sitting in front of you. Take a moment to just bask in the fact that it is a whole friggin computer that cost less than a new Xbox or Playstation game. Even if you completely screw up and smash it to smithereens, you can pick another up without too much pain. If you ever wanna like, hang out and make crazy circuits or play board games, you’re always invited to the Make: offices.
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