So you've got yourself a Raspberry Pi single board computer, you've installed an operating system, but now what? What can you actually do with this thing? In this video, I'm going to break down my top five favorite Raspberry Pi projects here at the start of 2023. And if you want to attempt any of these projects yourself, I'm going to provide all of the links and resources that you need in order to make your life easier. All right, let's dig in. Did you know that only about 25% of the people who watch these videos are actually subscribers? Hitting that subscribe button down below not only helps this channel tremendously, but it'll give you seven years of good luck. Plus, it's absolutely free. All right, before we dive into my top five Raspberry Pi projects, we have to discuss the elephant in the room, and that is Raspberry Pi availability. Here at the start of 2023, Raspberry Pi single board computers are almost never in stock. And if you look on eBay or other third party seller markets, scalpers have pumped the price of these boards two or three times beyond the retail price. This shriveled snollygoster is selling the normally $55 Raspberry Pi 4 model B for $155. And he's sold 23 of them in the past 24 hours. So what can you do besides hoping that scalpers take a long walk off of a short pier? Well, the first place that I would check is RPilocator.com. Now I have no affiliation with RPilocator, but this is a website that lets you know when these devices are in stock. You can filter on the seller, the region and the device that you want. You can leave the website open in a browser tab and have it auto refresh and ding once a device comes in stock. Or you can set up Twitter notifications from their Twitter feed. I personally have been able to get three Raspberry Pis in the last six months by using this website. Pro tip, it helps to be registered with all of the Raspberry Pi seller websites ahead of time so that you don't waste valuable time when these boards do come in stock. Another thing that you can do is buy one of the Raspberry Pi competitors, many of which you'll be able to use for all of the same projects that I'm going to talk about in this video. I just recently did a video on this Orange Pi 5, which has some pretty impressive hardware. The Raspberry Pi 4 model B is about three years old now, right? And it was built using chips and components that were widely available before the whole world was hit with massive chip shortages and supply chain issues. Some of these newer competitors were specifically designed around those shortages so that they are much more available. If you check out the download section of the RMBN OS website, you will see literally dozens of alternative single board computers. You just have to dig in and research which ones are available and how compatible they are with whatever projects you're trying to work on. So bottom line is, if you want to complain about availability down in the comments, that is absolutely your right. But keeping an eye on our Pi locator or finding an alternative board is going to be much more effective than just whining about it. Now on to the projects. In no particular order, we're going to start off with the project that I have probably used the most personally, and that's Pi-hole. Pi-hole is a network-wide ad blocker and DNS server, and it's absolutely one of the easiest Raspberry Pi projects on this list. You can have a Pi-hole up and running in less than 30 minutes, and it's going to be filtering ads out of your internet activity in no time. I especially love it for my IoT network where devices like my Roku are constantly trying to send data back to their servers. It must be so frustrating being a Roku at my house, feeling ignored, lonely, like there's no one listening to you. Thank you, Pi-hole. Here we can see on my main Pi-hole dashboard that the Pi-hole is blocking over 30% of all of the queries going out to the internet. And if you pair Pi-hole with some upstream DNS servers that filter out malware and adult content such as Cisco's Family Shield DNS, you've got a pretty comprehensive solution for safe surfing in your household. Now if you're looking to implement Pi-hole in your own network, I created the world's greatest Pi-hole tutorial step-by-step video and blog post. Link is down in the description below. Another easy yet super powerful Raspberry Pi project is PiVPN. With PiVPN, you can build your own OpenVPN or wire guard server that allows you to securely connect into your home network remotely. You can access your local servers and files and even use your home internet connection from a hotel room in Duluth, Georgia. The folks that maintain the PiVPN project have done an amazing job at keeping it up to date and making sure that the setup is as easy as possible even though VPN can be quite a complicated technology. Once the server is set up, it even generates QR codes for your clients so that you can easily connect them to the VPN. I use PiVPN myself in my home network and oftentimes I forget that I even have it running, but when I need to connect to it remotely, it's always right there and available for me to use. I have another full step-by-step video and blog post tutorial on setting up PiVPN if you are interested in using your own personal home VPN server. Links to all of these resources down in the description below. If you have a 3D printer, OctoPrint is a must-have add-on. I use OctoPrint every single time I 3D print something. At its most basic, it allows you to monitor the status of ongoing prints as well as send projects directly to your 3D printer over the network instead of having to transfer them over with an SD card. Once you start digging into OctoPrint plugins, however, you're going to open up a whole new world of 3D printing possibilities. There are plugins for everything from simple toolbars and status monitors that keep an eye on your print temperatures, all the way up to full touchscreen displays for controlling OctoPrint, and even tools such as Octolapse for creating those amazing 3D print time-lapse videos that all the kids on TikTok seem to like so much. OctoPrint takes almost no time to install, but it's definitely a project that can send you down some pretty deep rabbit holes once you begin to explore the plugins. Now, I haven't done any tutorials on OctoPrint myself, but the installation couldn't be easier. OctoPie is a Raspberry Pi image for OctoPrint that can be flashed onto a micro SD card directly from the official Raspberry Pi imager. Speaking of rabbit holes, the winner for the biggest potential rabbit hole has to go to my next favorite Raspberry Pi project, and that is Home Assistant. If you've never heard of Home Assistant, it has the power to change your life, quite literally. Home Assistant is an open source home automation server that can fully automate your home. It automatically detects and works with all of those little IoT devices that are filling up our homes and networks. Smart switches, light bulbs, thermostats, robot vacuums, video surveillance systems. I mean, you name it, if it can connect to your network, chances are it can be controlled and automated by Home Assistant. Now, I've automated a ton of stuff around my house, and I've barely scratched the surface of what Home Assistant can do for you. My entire office lighting system is on Home Assistant, and it's all tied into a single button on my stream deck. I've got lights and an air pump automated on my fish tank. My 3D printer power strip is a smart switch so I can turn the whole 3D printing setup on and off remotely. The next step for my own Home Assistant is to create some custom dashboards for different areas of my house, and then display those dashboards on cheap tablets. Now, I haven't quite gone down that particular rabbit hole yet, but eventually I'll find the time to do so. Now, I've not done any videos on Home Assistant, but there are entire YouTube channels dedicated to this project and creating home automations to really pimp your household to the max. My most recent Raspberry Pi project came out of a need to test T-Mobile home internet, video coming soon. I call it an internet speed test appliance. Now, this project brings together everything that you need to run a speed test on a set schedule and then graph the speed test results over time in Grafana. This is absolutely one of the most useful projects that I've done so far, and it can be expanded upon a lot if you want to do more than just internet speed testing. So here you can see the dashboard of Grafana that shows my speed test results. Now, while I'm only using this for monitoring a single internet connection today, this is just a full Grafana install, and it can be used for monitoring servers or anything else that has a data set Grafana can read. In the case of this particular appliance, I first started by installing the base Raspberry Pi OS and then the Ookla speed test CLI. Then I installed InfluxDB, which is a simple time series based database and set up the Ookla speed test results to write out to that database with a timestamp. Once all of that was done, it was simply a matter of installing Grafana and then using the InfluxDB database as a source for this graph. And then Bob's your uncle, right? You've now got an internet speed test appliance, and you can place that appliance in any network, and it's going to start measuring the internet and graphing the results over time. I haven't done a video on this particular project yet, but I do plan on doing one in the near future. So make sure you're subscribed to Crosstalk Solutions so that you don't miss out on any of our new videos. So those are my top five favorite projects for the Raspberry Pi. What are your favorite projects? Make sure you let me know down in the comments below. And if you're interested in keeping this party going, I have hand selected a couple of videos on the right here for you to watch next. The top video is my recent overview and setup of the Orange Pi 5, a brand new Raspberry Pi alternative, and the bottom video is the world's greatest pie hole tutorial.
