You've stayed strong through the week, and now it's time for some Raspberry Pi projects to occupy your weekend. Today, I'm showing you how to get your budget under control, document your homelab, and avoid prying eyes in your baby's room.
Keep your financial life private with Actual Budget
Don't let companies spy on your finances
Actual Budget
While you'd think that privacy would be a given in 2026, it's simply not. With companies like BetterHelp selling private, sensitive data to social media companies, keeping your own data private is more important now than ever before—especially with financial data. That's where Actual Budget comes in.
With Actual Budget, you're in control of your own financial data. Actual Budget is completely self-hostable and even works offline, if you want to host it on an air-gapped server for maximum privacy. Should you choose to open up the service, it offers optional end-to-end encryption for multi-device sync, with you still being the one in charge of your privacy and data.
Inside of Actual Budget, you'll get a simple user interface that lets you tackle finances with as few interferences as possible. It helps you actually plan your money, not just log expenses. There are also lots of built-in reports that you can run, like a net work report, cash flow, or a completely custom report.
If you're still using pen and paper to track your finances, then deploy Actual Budget on your Raspberry Pi and step into the 21st century with privacy in mind.
Finally document your homelab with a self-hosted wiki using BookStack
You'll thank yourself later
My homelab started out simple: one service with a handful of services running in one Docker instance. Now I have three mini PCs, three NAS servers, and a full-size desktop tower that runs my power-hungry virtual machines. Each mini PC runs Proxmox and has a handful of virtual machines running on them.
I now have more static IPs and services then I know what to do with, and remembering everything just isn't my strong suit—so I deployed BookStack in my own homelab, and think you should too.
With BookStack, you can build your own Wikipedia with whatever information you want it to have. I choose to document my homelab in it, but you could use it for anything, even writing the instructions for the card games you make up for your family.
BookStack is a simple Docker container to launch and it doesn't take up a ton of resources, making it an ideal service to run on a Raspberry Pi. So, if you haven't already started documenting your homelab, spin up BookStack and get started today.
Ditch subscriptions and creepy privacy policies with a DIY baby monitor
No company should have access to video feeds inside your home
BookStack
If you're worried about privacy at all, then you probably don't have security cameras inside your home—at least, not ones that talk to the outside world. I know I don't. But, I do know that whenever my wife and I have kids, I'll want a way to keep an eye on our little one without sacrificing privacy , and that's where building a DIY baby monitor comes in.
With a Raspberry Pi and a camera module, you can set up your own easy-to-access local-first baby monitor to keep an eye on your little one. The build is fairly simple, and it doesn't require any soldering or custom coding. You can even choose to have audio or not, depending on if you hook up a mic or leave at just a camera.
A DIY baby monitor is something that's as customizable as you want it. You can open the camera feed up to just a local monitor you have an HDMI cable plugged into on the other side of the wall, stream the feed on-demand, have a dedicated station set up to stream the feed 24/7, or any mixture of those features—or even something I haven't mentioned. The sky really is the limit here. You can even set up the camera feed to record 24/7 or just have it stream.
A project like this could run on just about any Pi with an internet and camera connection, so don't think you need a powerful Pi 5 to make a DIY baby monitor. Just grab whatever Pi you have in your drawer and get to building.
Mini PCs are great, but a Raspberry Pi is more versatile sometimes
There seems to be a lot of chatter online about moving to mini PCs from Raspberry Pi's , and there's definitely some merit to that. However, sometimes a Pi is just the best option.
Take the DIY baby monitor, for instance. Sure, you could deploy something like a ZimaBoard 2 for a fanless system and plug in a USB webcam and microphone to set it up, but that's bulkier and requires more power than a Pi Zero 2 W does, which would do the job quite well. Sometimes, a Pi is simply the best option for the job.
