It's that time of the week again—time for three more Raspberry Pi projects to try out! This weekend, I'm showing you a few projects that could be a bit more "in the weeds," so to speak. One of my favorites from this roundup is the LED status light tower, as I think that's a really neat project to tackle!
Personal "now playing" display
Know what's playing anywhere in the house using Home Assistant
If you have a lot of smart speakers in your house, there's a good chance many of them could be playing something different at the same time. That's why using a Raspberry Pi to build a now playing display is a great weekend project.
Honestly, the project is pretty straightforward. It starts with having Home Assistant installed on a device in the house, which could even be this Raspberry Pi. Once you have Home Assistant online, you need to bring all the smart speakers throughout your house into it, which I'd recommend using Music Assistant to do.
From there, the project is simple. Plug your Pi into a touchscreen display and mount it to the wall or leave it on your desk. You can then pull up the now playing screen for Music Assistant, or build out a custom Home Assistant dashboard, and view all of what's playing throughout your home.
Having this set up is a great way to either monitor what everyone's listening to or simply control the mood of different rooms in your house. If you have a spare Pi, this is a fun weekend project to tackle.
AI-powered "what's changed" monitor
Don't just use ChangeDetection.io, have AI process the data into plain English
ChangeDetection.io is a really cool service that can monitor websites for changes and notify you when something happens. However, sometimes the changes that ChangeDetection.io detects are a bit unreadable. That's where AI comes in.
ChangeDetection.io actually now has a local LLM field within its own software that can help summarize things, but it can be somewhat limited in its capabilities. That's why I definitely recommend setting up n8n alongside ChangeDetection.io.
Within ChangeDetection.io you can set up a webhook notification agent. That allows ChangeDetection.io to send a webhook push to another service, in this case, n8n.
Within n8n, you can then receive the webhook and process the payload, then pass that payload onto an LLM to summarize the changes. This is a great way to utilize the free API tokens that OpenAI or Google gives you . Of course, you can also integrate this with a locally-hosted LLM if you prefer.
From there, you can actually give the LLM some instructions on what to do with the payload it receives, like this:
Summarize this website change in plain English. Focus on what actually changed. Ignore navigation, footer, cookie banner, timestamp, and layout changes. Mention prices, dates, version numbers, availability, or policy changes when present. Keep the summary under 5 bullet points.
Once n8n processes the data and the LLM returns the summary, have it send you the result however you want—Discord, Telegram, email, or any other method that n8n has of notifying you.
This type of project might take a while to set up if you haven't configured your OpenAI account yet, but it's definitely worth it if you want to monitor websites and know what actually changed instead of just staring at a raw diff.
Build a homelab status light tower
Use LEDs to show whether your internet, servers, or smart home are healthy
Have you ever wanted to see how your homelab was doing health-wise at a glance? Well, your Raspberry Pi is actually a fantastic tool for that job. Instead of building a complex web dashboard with monitoring stats and the like, simply use an array of LEDs to indicate health. The Raspberry Pi has 40 GPIO pins that are perfect for this purpose.
You can set up an overall health monitor that uses a green, yellow, and red LED to show you an overview at a glance. This can be a mixture of things, from whether all servers are online or not, if there's an error somewhere, or anything else.
Then, you can set up other LEDs for very specific tasks. Have a red and green LED that indicates the reachability status of your NAS. Green means it's on and reachable, red means it can't be reached for some reason. You could even deploy this same setup for all the servers in your homelab.
Another use case could be setting up something like Uptime-Kuma to monitor the uptime of your services, and then using webhooks to send payloads to tell the Pi whether a service is on or off. When it's on, light up a specific green LED. If it goes offline, switch to the red LED for that service.
This is a fun project that could definitely take up a lot of time, but it's one that is quite useful in the homelab for sure. Being able to see, at a glance, what's on, off, working, or not, is definitely a game changer.
Your Raspberry Pis are way more useful than you might think
While I've moved my homelab to run on mini PCs now instead of Raspberry Pis, there are still a ton of uses for Raspberry Pis.
For instance, I definitely couldn't set up an LED status light tower with a mini PC very easily. I also couldn't build a now playing display that's anywhere near as compact as one that can be built with a Raspberry Pi.
So, if you're thinking that Raspberry Pis are useless, think again. There's so much that they're capable of doing, you just have to find the right project.
