Uses and Accessories

And Uses and Accessories.

So there’s basically quite a few accessories available. And so for the Raspberry Pi, if you’re adding a board or something too, it’s usually called a hat. And then there’s also different cases and controllers.

And so there are hats for automation. There’s a camera module one. You can add a touch screen. Pan and tilt hat, so if you basically want to control a motor. Environment hat, so you can do temperatures and other things like that. Flick! hats and that is gesture control.

An arcade bonnet to make it your own retro gaming machine so you can hook up all your different controllers, besides just the standard USB controller. An RGB matrix bonnet, which helps you control RGB colors and things like stack. Power over internet hat, in case you want to power things or cameras over your Raspberry Pi.

Animated eyes bonnet, and I’ll show you an example of that here in a minute, capacitive touch hats, GPS antenna. A piano hat, so basically a little piano keyboard. An eink display hat besides a regular display, machine learning hats. You can buy cases to build clusters for retro gaming, touch screens for LEGOs. And you can even make a laptop out of your Raspberry Pi.

And you’ll need something to control it. And you can control it with either a keyboard, touchscreen, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi. The Bluetooth and Wi-Fi or built in. And if you think of it, somebody has probably built a hat, bonnet, case, or controller for it.

Let’s look at some of the ways that I’m currently using Raspberry Pis, or single board computers. And so this is a kit, a robot kit, that I got. It’s a stem, so Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math kit for kids. But I built it with my daughter. But I like it too.

So there’s basically like three different ways of controlling this. There’s Bluetooth. There’s a controller. So Bluetooth is through your phone. And you can program it. And then also it has the eyes in front which are actually vision, so you can actually have it do obstacle avoidance with those, so very cool.

Next, I got this cute little case here. And you can see here there’s no ports on the front or the sides or the back. And so this one has a daughterboard where the side ports here are then with the daughterboard brought to the back of the computer there. Here, let’s see if I can get in their. There we go.

And I’ll just show you the difference here. So here, just the USB ports are on the back, along with the internet connection. And then the HDMI and the power port and the audio port are on the side here. And all those are on the back here. So very cool.

So what I’m using this for is a media center, because it’s nice and clean. It’s looks nice. And you can use a remote control with this. Or you could use it even as a gaming center or something like that.

And here’s just again the regular Raspberry Pi and the regular Raspberry Pi case. This, I’m using as a server with OpenMediaVaults. But also, this could be used for gaming if you want.

And for gaming, you can just pick up these little cheap controllers. They’re on Amazon, not very expensive. And that’s your easiest way to get started gaming and with Retro Pi, of course. And this is a Raspberry Pi signage that I have set up in my office. So now, back to Projects and Uses.

So again, desktop, laptop, we went over that. So basically, a desktop, you can just plug in a monitor and a keyboard in there. And it just makes a regular desktop a laptop. File server, so you can either use the Raspbian or you can use OpenMediumVault. And they actually have actually pretty nice server functions.

Cluster computer, so basically besides the case, there’s actually cluster software available for the Raspberry Pi in case you want to start to learn how to build your first supercomputer. You can use the Raspberry Pi to add wireless printing for a printer that doesn’t have a network monitor. A wireless repeater, I would probably just use a Pi 0W for that.

So you can make your Pi into a hotspot. So basically there’s hat available where you can add in your wireless provider’s card and just make it a hotspot that you can bring about it. With a screen, you can make it a portable terminal. So they have like such a 6-inch screens you can add to your Pi.

VPN server, a TOR router in case you’re in a foreign country or your office blocks certain countries or regions. You can make a Pi easily into a portable TOR router. Also, you can make it a Minecraft server. So for your kids, you don’t want them messing up with your home server or your office server, you can make just a single use Minecraft server.

Twitter bot, signage, very fun to do. I made one of those for my office, which I think I just showed you. So signage is very neat, because you can set up a sign for your office for your house even, you know, with things going on that displays, not only text, but can also display videos and even websites.

You can make a motion detection system with security cameras. You can have it do facial recognitions. And you can even make it a time lapse camera. And so it can use either USB cameras or the Raspberry Pi camera module.

Weather station, so with some of those environmental sensors, you can make it into a radio station. You can have it make a music box where it will play like Spotify, Google Music, SoundCloud. You can make it into a Google Assistant. Media center we’ve already talked about. You can automate your home Internet of Things devices and a gaming center with Retro Pi or the equivalent.

And if you can think of it, probably somebody has built it and has a how-to on how to do it.