Are you ready for another round of Raspberry Pi projects to tackle after the first full week of the year? Here are three fun projects that will test your skills in soldering, configuring, and customizing.
Create your own local time server with a Stratum-1 NTP server
Who needs the internet to know what time it is?
Have you ever wanted an ultra-accurate time clock for your homelab? No? Me neither, but it sounds like a really cool project to do. With a few components and your Raspberry Pi, you can deploy a system that keeps extremely precise time—down to the microsecond.
To start, you'll need a Pi 3b or newer for the project. Then, you need a GPS receiver of some sort. I recommend the Uputronics GPS HAT as it has the GPIO header pre-soldered, but the Adafruit Ultimate GPS HAT is another great option if you don't mind soldering the GPIO header yourself to save a few bucks.
You're going to need additional components, like a U.FL to SMA Cable (to connect the GPS hat with an external GPS antenna), a SMA GPS Antenna , and some other odds and ends, like a CR1220 battery to help the Pi find satellites faster after a reboot.
Once you have the hardware sorted out, you'll need to move on to the software. Jeff Geerlingis here to save the day with Time-Pi , a GitHub repo that walks you through step-by-step on how to deploy and configure the software. I'd definitely set aside at least a few hours, if not the entire weekend, for this project. It might look somewhat simple on the surface, but debugging could possibly take quite a bit of time depending on what issues you run into.
Add addressable LED backlighting to your home theater
Forget Philips Hue, just build your own LED backlight.
I've wanted reactive bias lighting in my home theater ever since I saw it nearly a decade ago. It's just such a spendy upgrade that I've never pulled the trigger on it. However, with a Raspberry Pi, an LED light strip, and some other accessories, you can easily build your own reactive bias lighting that mounts right to the back of your TV.
To get started, you'll need a set of individually addressable LEDs, like a WS2812B strip. The Pi doesn't provide enough juice through its GPIO pins to drive the lights directly, though, so you'll want to pick up a power supply that's designed for whatever LED strip you buy. If you go with the BTF-LIGHTING WS2812B strip on Amazon, for instance, then you can pick up the BTF-LIGHTING ESP32 WLED LED Strip Controller , which will both power and provide wireless control of the LED strip.
Once you have the lighting strip and LED controller/power supply sorted, it's time to move to the software side of things. You'll want to download and install Hyperion on your Raspberry Pi as this will be the control center for the project. Lastly, pick up some form of an HDMI splitter and capture card that matches the quality of your home theater. The splitter will split the signal from your source device (like an Apple TV) and send the signal to both your TV and the Raspberry Pi's new capture card.
From there, you just set up and configure Hyperion! There's detailed documentation on the Hyperion website and in the GitHub repo that you can follow to figure out how to configure it for your specific setup.
Give your home theater the upgrade it deserves by repurposing that old Raspberry Pi you have sitting in a drawer.
Keep on top of stock prices, cryptocurrency, and more with an LED matrix display
What's Bitcoin doing today?
u/CheersBros | Reddit
A ticking LED matrix display is a project I really want to tackle, and it's on my list of things to do once I have more time on my hands. You, however, should definitely consider doing one this weekend.
To start with, pay the rpi-rgb-led-matrix GitHub repo a visit and start going through the documentation there. This project is a bit more limited, and is supported by the Raspberry Pi 4 and earlier models, but not the 5.
With that aside, this is the perfect project for the aging Pi 3b that you don't know what to do with. Essentially, you can pick up some LED matrix displays from Adafruit (or another supplier) and connect them to your Raspberry Pi's GPIO header. From there, the software in the rpi-rgb-led-matrix GitHub repo does all the rest of the work.
The GitHub repo has some pretty in-depth documentation on how the project works. However, if you're looking for a little bit of lighter reading, then Adafruit's guide will definitely help you get up and going without spending a full day reading docs.
With an LED matrix display, you can showcase all sorts of information, from stock prices, current YouTube subscribers, or the current cost of Bitcoin. The sky's the limit for what you can show here, so use your imagination and have fun building out this unique project this weekend.
While these projects do require extra hardware, not all Raspberry Pi projects force you to spend extra money. There are plenty of software-only things you can do with your Pi, from running a VPN server to hosting a website . So, whatever you're interested in, pull that Pi out of your office drawer and do something with it this weekend.
