Three things you can do with a Raspberry Pi besides emulate Nintendo games.
First things first: I am very much not a programmer (hence this here squarespace site). However, I have been online since the internet was kind of hard, so I am mildly comfortable googling terminal commands to hunt and peck onto a command line via ssh. But honestly, a bunch of this stuff is available pre-configured so that you just have to download a file and flash it to card to shove into the pi. Given the affordability of the hardware- $5 to $45 bucks, give or take, depending- I think it’s worth spending a couple hours after work playing with them and seeing if they might be useful around your shop.And if not, you can always just download a retropie image and play Street Fighter.
A big dumb clock.
Pictured above, and could also be titled “One thing to do with an old monitor that is too janky to use as an actual monitor”, it’s a big dumb clock and it does what it says on the box. For this installation, I used a $10 Raspberry P Zero W. It’s just dangling loose from the back of the monitor. It comes in handy, particularly as I work on my projects in the evenings and those evenings often turn into early mornings. There was no pre-configured image to download for this, but it was easy enough to follow these super clear instructions I found via google.
Source: How-To: Rasberry Pi Fullscreen Digital Wall Clock
Block ads across your entire home network.
Unlike adblocking plugins, which have to be configured on a browser by browser and user / device basis, Pi Hole works at the router level and protects every device on your network. Computers, Phones, and smart devices. The latter is eye opening- a modern smart TV tries to do A LOT of shady things, and Pi Hole helps shut that crap down. It’s free, super easy to install, and highly recommended.
Source: Pi-hole: A black hole for internet advertisements
Command your robots from a web browser.
At the office my 3D printer is on the other side of the building, and honestly it was kind of a chore to mess with before, shuffling gcode around via USB. I very nearly spent a couple hundred bucks on a wireless upgrade when I discovered OctoPrint. Holy crap. It’s an awesome web-based front end compatible with most open source 3d printers and it’s soooo dope. Connect via browser to a Pi connected to the printer via USB. It can control a webcam you can monitor in realtime, as well as collect timelapses after the print. It’;;s also easy to install, with a preconfigured image called OctoPi.
But the fun doesn’t stop there.
There is also an amazing equivalent for the Shapeoko - or many other hobby CNC machines- called CNCjs. It is also super dope, and a great alternative to getting a laptop dusty running Carbide Motion. Again, jsut create your gcode with whatever app you normally use, be it Carbide Create, Vectric Vcarve, Fusion 360 etc and drag and drop it to your machine over wifi via web browser and away it goes. Awesome.
Even better? Some nerds have actually made a pre-configured setup that has BOTH OctoPrint and CNCjs pre-installed so you can check them both out with zero hassle /experience with a Pi. You WILL want some horse power though, at least, relatively speaking as far as Raspberry Pis will go. Support for the 4 was recently officially added, but you would be just fine with a 3b+. The Zero W variants are not recommended. This is an amazing way to get a taste of what both apps- and this hardware- has to offer, even to a casual user without a comp sci degree.
Source: Dip a toe in the pi, V1Pi by v1engineering
