The Raspberry Pi is the best toy for developers. Here are 10 projects.
1. Pi-hole — DNS Ad Blocker¶
curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash
2. Home Assistant — Smart Home¶
Home automation. Supports hundreds of devices.
3. NAS with OpenMediaVault¶
Connect a USB drive, install OMV, and you have your own NAS.
4. K3s — Lightweight Kubernetes¶
curl -sfL https://get.k3s.io | sh -
5. VPN Server (WireGuard)¶
apt install wireguard
6. Monitoring with Prometheus + Grafana¶
Monitor temperature, CPU, network. Docker Compose setup in 5 minutes.
7. Retro Gaming (RetroPie)¶
NES, SNES, N64 and more. Nostalgia.
8. Nextcloud — Your Own Cloud¶
Alternative to Google Drive/Dropbox. Full control over your data.
9. Network Monitor¶
Speedtest every hour, uptime monitoring of your services.
10. CI/CD Runner¶
GitHub Actions self-hosted runner or GitLab runner on Pi.
Hardware Tip¶
Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) is ideal. Add an NVMe hat for fast storage.
raspberry piiotprojects