In Pictures: 15 cool things you can do with a Raspberry Pi

The world of delicious Raspberry Pi The teaching aid/creativity toy/teeny little computer that is the Raspberry Pi has become more popular than its creators at the Raspberry Pi Foundation ever dreamed it would. Here are 15 of the more notable uses to which the versatile device has been put.
Otto Remember how pictures work in Harry Potter? That’s kind of the idea with the Otto, a Kickstarter for a Pi-powered camera that takes animated gifs instead of still images. You use a crank to take pictures, as well, for additional lo-fi tweeness.
Pi glasses Move over, Google Glass. Adafruit has a design that uses a pair of $100 video glasses to send images to a Raspberry Pi via composite video. Doesn’t quite have the feature set of Google Glass, but hey, at $100 for the headware, who’s complaining?
RasPi supercomputer Individually, a Raspberry Pi board isn’t very powerful, by modern computing standards. Wire 64 of them together, however, and that is no longer the case – as a professor from the U.K. University of Southampton has demonstrated.
Weather station Ioannis Kedros, an enthusiastic tinkerer who blogs at EmbeddedDay.com, turned a Raspberry Pi and a Styrofoam box into a teeny little weather station. No word on whether he’s going to add a bad haircut and some silly jokes to the device’s repertoire.
Penguin monitor The Raspberry Pi is already used to track animals and defend against poachers in Africa, so why not use it to track penguins, as well? Researchers blogging at PenguinLifelines now have a year-round way of watching the marine birds in Antarctica.
Braille teacher Project Mudra is the brainchild of engineers Sanskriti Dawle and Aman Srivastav, who are designing an affordable “dicta-teacher,” meant to teach disadvantaged blind children how to read Braille. (H/T Trak.in)
Tablet computer If you can make a Raspberry Pi into a phone, why not a tablet? That’s what Andre Hitchman apparently said to himself before designing this surprisingly functional-looking tablet computer.
Near-satellite You could also use a Raspberry Pi to power spacegoing equipment of some sort, much as the North Carolina Near Space Research group is doing with very-high-altitude balloons. Some of the pictures taken from the edge of space are, as you might expect, pretty impressive.
Beer brewing machine OK, so it’s not a COMPLETE beer brewing machine – it’s a sophisticated temperature controller, so it can’t pitch your yeast or sparge your wort, no matter how nicely you ask – but the BrewPi system does take some of the tension out of one of the toughest parts of the brewing process.
Pool table This pool table, created by Liberty Games, has a special, Raspberry Pi-powered module in it that allows it to accept payment in Bitcoin. Because of course it does.
Zillions and zillions of robots The number of small robots that people have made with the Raspberry Pi is very large, and it would be easy to fill any number of slideshows with examples. For now, rest assured that there are lots and lots of Raspberry Pi-powered robots out there.
Artistic drawing tool Blackstripes automatic drawing machine takes digital photographs and turns them into handsome line drawings. It’s cool, all right, and probably handy if you want to convince people that you have some kind of skill in visual arts. No, really, I drew that myself.
Substitute Mario machine? And you thought the original had low-fi graphics – here’s Super Mario Brothers hooked up to a 24x24 LED matrix, powered by (naturally) a Raspberry Pi. The jumps will be difficult to gauge, I’d say.
Bartender An Oxford PhD student, Johan Paulsson, uses a Raspberry Pi to track supplies, sales, and even play the music at a local student pub, though he apparently doesn’t let it serve actual drinks or throw out kids with fake IDs.
A constant gardener Just in case you thought the Internet of Things didn’t include some of the messier and more organic parts of human existence, Valkyrie Savage is here to disabuse you of that notion, with this Pi-powered system that automatically irrigates a garden.

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