Raspberry Pis are awesome little tools, and I’ve had the pleasure to work with them both in my day job and as a hobby. Here are some of my favorite things you can do with them.
VPN into your home with OpenVPN This is perhaps the most useful thing I’ve done with a Raspberry Pi to date. By using a pi as a VPN into my home network, I can securely access all the devices I have in my apartment, and all the files thereupon. Can’t find the tutorial I originally used, but it wasn’t the best anyway, so here’s the one everyone generally recommends: Raspberry Pi OpenVPN Server.
Your own personal Dropbox with ownCloud Speaking of accessing files remotely, ownCloud is a great way to take control of your cloud storage needs. It’s open source, you can set up encryption, and most importantly, it’s on your own hardware.
Make a TV Remote that you can automate This one is perhaps a little frivolous. I’m currently in the process of building one of these so that when I leave for and come back from work, I can turn off and on my television, and set it to Chromecast. This is one of the first steps I’ve taken towards turning my apartment into a ‘smart’ apartment, and probably the most important one. My television is essentially my home entertainment system, so I’d really like to use custom voice commands to, say, turn on my hacking music, or set an alarm for the morning to wake me up with Pandora’s classical station. Love the idea, and it will most likely be powered by Raspberry Pis.
Monitor the sites you care about More details about this in a previous post…
Use it as a home media center I have a fair number of really good movies on one of my external hard drives, and when I have friends over, a tiny computer screen sometimes just doesn’t do them justice. That’s where OSMC comes in. It stands for Open Source Media Center, and it certainly delivers.
Make it into a (more) secure Bitcoin server After so many bitcoin market places getting wiped out by hackers or scammers, having your wallet on hardware you control can be crucial. Fortunately, by setting up a lightweight wallet like Electrum on your Raspberry Pi, you can make your bitcoins significantly safer.
Store your code privately, without paying GitHub Setting up a simple git server is an easy way to store your code privately without paying for repos on GitHub. But to be clear, collaboration with this setup can be a challenge.
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