UPDATE: Now that the Raspberry Pi 4 has launched there is even more potential for awesome products. Check out what the Pi 4 can do. in our coverage of the story

1. Building a Raspberry Pi supercomputer cluster

Difficulty: Challenging

Sure, it won’t replace CERN, or Google, or perhaps even your main PC’s processing power, but this project is great for learning about cluster computing.

The great thing is, it is scalable and has led to some pretty incredible creations.

Image Credit: ZDNet

One of the most compact ways of getting into cluster computing is with a Pi Cluster Hat.

This is still a challenge though since officially, you can only buy a single Pi Zero, unless you want to bulk buy large (very large) orders, in which, the price per unit actually increases.

The Cluster Hat is sits on top of a normal Raspberry Pi and allows the addition of up to four Pi Zeros to build a cluster.

Of course, the normal Pi 3’s size is still pretty compact so it will take more time to assemble a Pi supercomputer than it does trying to figure out the geometry of it.

It’s hard to believe just how much time must have been spent trying to screw all the boards in place on the image below!

BitScope is a 3000 core supercomputer made up of 750 Raspberry Pis in a 35U Rack Server Case. Image Credit: MagPi Magazine/Bitscope

If you are interested, this blog post compares a Pi Cluster to a server setup to see the performance differences.

I won’t spoil their results, but if the next gen Raspberry Pi 4 models come with faster CPUs and more memory, their resulting clusters may well start being a threat to certain systems.

Recommended Tutorials:

2. Using the Raspberry Pi as a headless torrent box

Difficulty: Easy (plenty of tutorials and troubleshooting)

Torrenting is something which you want to leave running in the background.

It can be a pain to interrupt if you need to bring your laptop to work with you, but unless you are rolling in cash, this frustration isn’t worth the cost of a new PC.

This is exactly the niche for the Raspberry Pi.

Cheap and low-power enough to always leave on, a Raspberry Pi will sort your torrents out without much worry.

My Raspberry Pi Zero W (ghetto) mounted to the wall. It is being used as a headless Torrent box.

What does headless mean though? Simply put, it means it is running without a screen.

Once the Pi is set up, a screen is not necessary.

A great model for a headless torrent box is the Raspberry Pi Zero W.

You can access the network interface of your Torrenting tool of choice on any computer in the network.

To view the Pi’s desktop after setup, a connection can be made through SSH or VNC, and if you mount the drive that the torrents save to, you can map it on the network and access remotely.

Recommended Tutorials:

3. You can actually produce music on a Raspberry Pi

Difficulty: Moderate-Advanced (depending on audio understanding)

In 2016, I actually wrote about this very topic, which turned out to be the most popular post of all time on Audio Ordeal.

With even more powerful versions of the Pi currently on the market, this is as good a time as ever to give it a shot!

Using a masterpiece of efficient software design, you can get some pretty great performance using Non which is basically a modular digital audio workstation (DAW).

If you do plan on running it on a Raspberry Pi, you will find you need more kit eg. a soundcard, however after the price of a Pi, you will likely have some money spare for these extra devices.

It’s crazy to think that more powerful computers struggle with audio production tasks.

In reality, the bottleneck is the size of most software DAWs.

4. Mini Touch-Screen Computer

Difficulty: Easy

If you are looking for a simple desk or bedside companion, why not try turning your Pi into a touchscreen device?

You can get touchscreens for as low as £25 and they offer a great alternative to headless operation.

If you are using your Pi as a home server where you want to check the status quickly, or simply want to use it as a small PC, a small screen is a great friend.

5. Using the Raspberry Pi as a Timelapse Camera

Difficulty: Easy

If you want to set up timelapses out your window, or even a security system, you should consider the Pi.

The Raspberry Pi has a header on the motherboard for a camera module, so this is one of the easiest projects to get started with.

The biggest thing to watch out for here is making sure you get the correct camera module as different models support different sizes.

There are many different tutorials out there for using the timelapse, some of them are simple, going all the way up to complex coding.

It is perhaps one of the first projects to try if you want to get your hands wet with coding.

Recommended Tutorials:

6. Raspberry Pi Internet monitor

Difficulty: Medium (easy if you leave out the Twitter bot)

Are you tired of your internet service provider? Want them to know whenever your internet drops below an acceptable speed?

One Redditor set up their Pi to monitor their internet and tweet Comcast whenever it was too low.

Recommended Tutorials:

7. Raspberry Pi DJ

Difficulty: Medium (requires a bit of DJ knowledge)

You can actually set up your Raspberry Pi as a makeshift DJ rig.

There are several options here, one is to use Mixxx, a free DJing software which sort of works ok on the Pi.

You wouldn’t want to perform a set in front of people with it, but it is stable enough for the house.

The second option is using the Pi as a DVS (Digital Vinyl System) as the PiDeck.

PiDeck

Recommended links:

8. Raspberry Pi TOR Router

With internet privacy becoming a growing concern, more and more people are taking to measures such as VPNs and TOR.

TOR, which stands for The Onion Router, is a way of accessing blocked parts of the web and maintaining a level of anonymity (CAUTION: you can still be traced).

By using a wireless-enabled model of the Raspberry Pi, you can connect that to the main router and set up TOR.

Then any time you want to go through TOR on another device, connect to the Raspberry Pi instead.

Recommended links:

What did we miss?

If you think we missed anything, drop suggestions in the comments below, I’m sure others would want to see them as well!

Tom Jarvis http://audioordeal.co.uk Music Producer, DJ, total geek. I am the site owner and main writer at Audio Ordeal and Tech Ordeal. My PC screen is normally filled with unfinished Ableton Live projects or Battlefield games. See author's posts

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