Raspberry Pi Projects

Halloween Pi Project: Pumpkin Pi Trick-or-Treat Tracker

Looking for a quick Halloween Pi project that's useful in more ways than one? Want to put that Pi Zero W to good use? Feel like using data to determine how much candy you need for next year?

Get ready to build the Pumpkin Pi Trick-or-Treat Tracker! Doubling as decoration and a people tracker, this Pi-in-a-Pumpkin changes color and streams when motion is detected. Starting from absolute scratch, this project shouldn't take you more than an afternoon to put together - just in time for Halloween!

Getting Started with the Pi Zero W - Motion Dashboard

Raspberry Pi just released what we've all been waiting for - the Pi Zero W. A full Linux computer complete with WiFi, bluetooth, and a camera connector! And the best part? It's only $10.

In honor of this most exciting board, we've put together a quick little tutorial on hooking up a streaming motion sensor to your new little Pi Zero W! We'll go through board setup, connecting the sensor, and creating your own live motion dashboard.

How to Remotely Monitor Your Pi Processes

If you are using one or more Raspberry Pis to run a dedicated task (such as monitoring who's at home or the weather or your beer fridge), you need those processes to run uninterrupted. A task that exits unexpectedly may need your immediate attention to avoid lost data, project delays, or a system failure. It is impractical to manually babysit a bunch of Pis to make sure everything keeps running. A better way to ensure continuous operation is to be alerted when a process exits and be able to pull up a single dashboard at anytime to see the status of every important process running on every one of your deployed Pis.

Cellular & GPS Enabled Pi Zero: Fona + Pi Zero

What if your Raspberry Pi Zero could access internet services from anywhere? What if your Fona Cellular GSM and GPS breakout had the brains of a full Linux computer behind it? What if you could access the Fona's cellular capabilities and GPS data from a Raspberry Pi at the same time?

Well, you'd have a pretty sweet start to any IoT project you can think of. And this tutorial's gonna help you do it.

Create a System Health Dashboard for your Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pis are being used to drive a ridiculous number of projects ranging from fun hobby projects to mission critical functions. Despite being small, user-friendly, and inexpensive, your Pi contains an impressive number of complex subsystems that must work to keep your project running. This makes being able to monitor the health of your Pi important in many applications from ongoing maintenance of a long-term project to profiling the performance of a new prototype.

Protect Your Girl Scout Cookies with a Raspberry Pi

Admit it. Few things in this world bother you more than when someone opens up your favorite box of Girl Scout cookies and starts devouring that luscious goodness that you look forward to all year. You brainstorm for hours and hours trying to figure out where to hide your Somoas, Trefoils, and Thin Mints so no one else in your home will get close to your stash. If you knew the instant someone compromised your ingenious cookie hiding spot, you would utilize every ounce of resourcefulness and athleticism in your body to save your Precious before it is too late.

The GrovePi Plug-N-Stream Data Playground

The ready availability of so many different kind of sensors is incredible. Temperature, humidity, motion, ultrasonic, air quality, sound, light, pressure, gas, moisture, UV, PH, ... the list goes on and on. When you make these sensors web-connected, the possibilities are endless and awesome. The Grove System simplifies the process of wiring up sensors and various other electronic components by packaging each sensor/component into modules with a common interface to eliminate the need for complex breadboard wiring. Using a board like a GrovePi+ connected to a web-connected Raspberry Pi gives you a Lego-like experience for creating your own electronic masterpieces.

If the Grove System makes wiring up complex electronic circuits easy, connecting the data from those circuits to your own personal, web-based data playground should be just as easy. Initial State simplifies the process of capturing data from web-connected devices and turning that data into dashboards, waveforms, charts, and general analytics. Combine GrovePi+ and Initial State together, and you have the ultimate plug-n-stream data playground.

Raspberry Pi GPS Tracker

Here is an updated tutorial for setting up a Raspberry Pi GPS Tracker in an even simpler, more reliable way with less hardware! You just need a Raspberry Pi 2 with Jessie and an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout.

Turn your Raspberry Pi into a Smart Home Hub

We live in a wonderful time where incredibly capable devices with internet connectivity cost less than $20. This makes developing your own "Internet of Things" things easier than ever. An ever-growing concern with all of these internet-connected devices, however, is security. Many of these little devices can't handle basic security encryption like TLS (Transport Layer Security). And if you want to stream to a secure platform like Initial State, you must be able to perform a secure authentication "handshake". So how can we fix this?

By using a device actually capable of using security protocols, like the Raspberry Pi, we can route "insecure" requests on a local network through this "hub", encrypt the requests, and then send them over the worldwide web. So we get the security provided by a heavy device like the Pi, with all the price advantages of a cheap, internet-connected board! And the best part? The hub is device agnostic, meaning you can use any device/combination of devices to build your smart home!

PiOT 101 - Raspberry Pi + Internet of Things

Are you looking for a thorough "getting started" tutorial that takes you from unboxing your Pi to putting together a real, practical application? Something that teaches you the basics of setting up your Pi, using a breadboard to build simple circuits, and running simple Python scripts to control those circuits? Perhaps you are looking for an easy-to-follow tutorial that walks you through building a live Internet of Things project that streams data from sensors to a cloud service. If so, then we created a tutorial that you will love - PiOT 101.

The PiOT 101 tutorial started out as an in-person, beginners workshop hosted in Nashville, TN. After 10 workshops and constant tweaks, the tutorial that everyone was following became so thorough that hardly anyone asked a question or needed help finishing the entire workshop. Workshop attendees ranged from kids in fifth grade to engineers. By the time they finished, they all understood how to use a Pi to build something real and practical.

This tutorial is designed to take you from a complete novice to an Internet of Things (IoT) maker in two hours.