The Raspberry Pi came onto the scene on February 29, 2012. The first model released was the Model B, for $35. I was eager to get my hands on one, and it wasn’t long before I had one to play with. My initial reason for owning one was to use it as a streaming platform, much like the modified X-Box I had running XBMC. The Xbox had a 733 MHz Intel Pentium III, 64 MB of DDR SDRAM, and an Nvidia GeForce 3-based custom NV2A GPU. I worked ok, but I wasn’t as thrilled with it as I once was. The Raspberry Pi Model B had a 700 MHz single-core 32-bit ARM11 CPU, a VideoCore IV GPU, 512 MB RAM and a 26-pin GPIO header, which meant I could do other neat things with it. All-in-all, the Pi worked better for my use case. It had real USB ports, not misshapen ports that made you have to buy only MS products. There were only 2 USB ports, but they were more useful. It used an SD card for the OS, which ran much faster than the HDD in the Xbox, had both an HDMI port and analog video out. It used a LOT less power, didn’t generate any heat to speak of, made no noise, and seemed more stable overall.
Flash forward 3 years, and the Raspberry Pi had evolved to the Raspberry Pi 2, which now had 4 USB ports, a 900 MHz Cortex-A7 CPU, and 1 GB of RAM. It now had a 40 PIN GPIO header instead of a 26 pin, which meant it could control a lot more devices. Now the platform was REALLY starting to take off. More and more projects were being dedicated to the Raspberry Pi platform, and the projects just kept getting better and better.
Below are some of my current favorite Raspberry Pi projects. These are the ones I have had the most fun with, found the most useful, or were just flat out something I had to try once because it looked cool.
Media Centers
KODI (Media Center)
Kodi, which started off as the XMBC (Xbox Media Center) was by far the best platform for streaming for a VERY long time. I would argue it still holds it own with any of the others, depending on what features are important to you. For me, I wanted to be able to stream videos, pictures, and music from my network server. I tried PLEX, but found it lacking in a lot of ways.
If you want to try Kodi, check out their website at Kodi.TV
OSMC
LibreELEC
OpenMediaVault (OMV)
OpenMediaVault lets you turn your Raspberry Pi into a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. It works great, has an easy to understand and use GUI, makes all of the boring technical Linux stuff easier to use, and can be built for well under $100.
Ad Blocking
PiHole
Gaming
RetroPie