3 Raspberry Pi Projects to Try This Weekend (October 24

Are you looking for a fun weekend project with your Raspberry Pi? I recently purchased a few extra Pis for my home lab and immediately started creating new things just for fun. Here are three projects you can implement before Monday arrives.

Brand

Raspberry Pi

Processor

Cortex-A72 (ARM v8)

With the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, you can create all sorts of fun projects and upgrade the gadgets in your home. You can also install a full desktop operating system and use it like a regular computer.

Track your Pi stats with this unique Raspberry Pi dashboard

Whether you have one Raspberry Pi or several, knowing your system statistics can be vitally important. I just picked up a few extra Pis for various projects around my house, and I have three in a little mini rack that I 3D printed. This means that temperature could become an issue and monitoring different parts of the system is more important than ever.

That’s where the Raspberry Pi Dashboard comes in. This simple PHP dashboard gives you all the information you could want about your Pi. At a glance, you’ll be able to see things like uptime, CPU temperature, RAM and CPU usage, available storage, and even have power switches at your fingertips.

Deployment is actually quite simple. All it takes is some type of web server (apache, nginx, lighttpd) and PHP installed on your system. If you’re looking for a quick way to get started, here’s the command I ran to deploy the Raspberry Pi dashboard.

        sudo apt update && sudo apt install apache2 php libapache2-mod-php -y

    

This will install Apache2, PHP and the libraries required to link PHP and Apache2. From there, you can follow the default instructions in the GitHub project readme. In total, it took about five minutes to deploy the dashboard, and I can now easily keep tabs on all my Raspberry Pis at a glance.

Turn your old Pi and monitor into an always-on clock and weather station

Even though I don’t have a spare monitor (yet), I’m still thinking about finding a way to use the astronomy/weather clock. Designed to give you a simple clock and weather display, aw-clock (what the project calls it for short) is quite versatile and robust. You can add things like a GPS hat to your Pi and even physical temperature or humidity sensors.

The installation procedure for aw-clock is a bit more complicated than the Raspberry Pi Dashboard. The Astronomy/Weather Clock project is only available on GitHub and you will start by cloning it to your system. Then you can start the building process. I had to make some changes to my system to get it built, because the Chrome browser is no longer available (and the project is just Chrome now). I got past this with a simple command:

        sudo apt update && sudo install chromium && sudo ln -s /usr/bin/chromium /usr/bin/chromium-browser

    

This command installs Chromium, then links the Chromium binary to the Chromium browser file, allowing aw-clock to complete the build. I ran into one final issue at the end of the build script, where it wouldn’t launch because I didn’t have any desktop management software installed, as I was running my Pi headless.

However, I was easily able to access the Pi’s IP address and port that I configured at the start of the build script and see aw-clock just fine. It’s really nice that it works this way, because you can access the stream on any computer in your house. In fact, you could even have a Pi hosting the aw-clock server, and then access it from other low-power Pis (like the Pi Zero 2 W) stationed around your home or business.

Ditch Facebook and Self-Host Your Own Personal Blog

I’ve touched on blog hosting many times in various capacities, but none of the traditional platforms are really focused on moving away from Facebook for a more centralized approach. This is where Haven comes in. Designed to be a private blog that you can write and your friends can view, Haven is definitely a unique platform.

While you can choose to have Haven host your blog, you can also easily run it in Docker. As I’m using Portainer I had to generate my own Docker Compose file, but if you use Docker-CLI it can all happen in the terminal.

Once up and running, Haven is pretty straightforward. It’s designed as a private blog, meaning all users must log in to see what you’ve written. Think of it as the same hurdle as adding a friend on Facebook. You can either give people their own IDs or just have a “friends” ID here.

Haven works with Markdown, which means you can write all your posts in Markdown and then publish them directly to Haven. It also supports image uploading, which is a very nice feature.

These are just a few fun projects to do on your Raspberry Pi this weekend. If you already have a dashboard, clock, or microblog on your Pi, there are plenty of other things to try!

You can turn your Pi into a game streaming client or even create a smart mirror. One thing I really want to try someday is building a retro tabletop arcade with a spare Pi. The possibilities are endless, so go grab your Pi and start tinkering!