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raspberry pi turns 10 today that's right we went from this little underpowered but lovable pie model b in 2012 all the way to this hundred times faster pi 4 model b a decade later and to celebrate i'm going to run through my 10 favorite pi projects and i'd like to thank redshirt jeff for letting me borrow his shirt today starting at number 10 if you have a media library with songs movies and tv shows what better way to showcase it than by running osmc cody or plex these media libraries run great on the pi and you can play back all your media stream and record live tv and enjoy music and apps all running open source software on your pie drop the apple tv or chromecast and pick up a pie instead number nine a pie cluster i call mine the bramble and it's a set of four raspberry pies i use to learn about kubernetes k3s and distributed computing i've also built a cluster of pi's using four new compute module fours on the turing pi 2 and used it to see how the raspberry pi compares to the top 500 supercomputers in the world well at least in 1999 and then i took that same cluster a hundred miles away and ran my website for my cousin's farm completely wireless using solar power and a 4g modem pi clusters aren't faster than a modern desktop pc but i've learned so much from building pi clusters of the years i can't recommend it enough if you want to learn about infrastructure and devops with a cluster that fits in the palm of your hand next up at number 8 i spent a lot of time this year learning about 3g 4g and 5g modems with the raspberry pi and they found out you can build your own mobile hotspot using a pi heck there are even dedicated boards like this one from wave share that have multiple network ports wi-fi and a slot for a 4g or 5g modem so you can build your own router that's just as powerful as a 500 cradle point all using open source software check out my blog for an article on 4g lte with the pi and subscribe to this channel because i'm going to cover more on wireless on the pi soon going along with the theme of remote access number 7 is the second most useful addition i made to my home lab a vpn and not like those silly vpns you hear other youtubers advertise every day no this vpn is completely under my control i'm talking about pi vpn it's the easiest way to set up your own little in-home wireguard vpn giving you access to whatever else you have on your home network like a nas or pi hole for complete privacy it's a little more advanced and not everyone needs one but if you do this is a great free and open source solution and runs perfectly on a raspberry pi and speaking of nasa's for number six the pi isn't the fastest nas out there but install open media vault or next cloud on a raspberry pi and you can set it up to be a great little gigabit mask to store all your media library photos music and documents i talked a lot about different pi nasa's last year from the rad sataco to the access interceptor both with five sata drives i even built this ridiculous five thousand dollar 48 terabyte all ssd nests with the taco now the pi's processor holds it back from competing with a modern synology qnap or asus door ness but it works great if you just have a gigabit network and don't need to do crazy things like transcode 4k video the pi is plenty fast to run as a home automation hub however and that's why i put this on my list at number five last month i set up home assistant's new yellow automation hub it uses a compute module for an nvme storage has built-in zigbee and power over ethernet and you can easily add a z-wave radio it's a great little unit and i've already automated half of this office using it you can do some amazing things with systems like home assistant and openhab and they both run great on a pi 4 or even on a pi 3b plus but what if you don't have one of these newer pies even older pies can do number four on my list you can use your pie as a camera there are tons of different cameras you can use with the pi from the tiny pi camera v2 that fits inside this little pi zero case to the hq camera with its bigger image sensor and interchangeable lenses there's even an autofocus camera from arducam now and i reviewed it earlier this year but hardware is only part of the equation what makes cameras on the pi really powerful is the software from using python to build a custom time-lapse setup to running motion eye or tensorflow to build a surveillance camera or smart doorbell the pi has you covered and if you're in a pinch you can even use show me webcam and turn a pie into a usb webcam next up on the list is related but much more expansive number three environment monitoring i already display local weather and some information about my home's air quality monitors on my raspberry pi dashboards but did you know there's also a raspberry pi system for seismic monitoring and raspberry pi also introduced the pico last year a microcontroller that's great for building into remote sensors for all kinds of different monitors this year i'm going to monitor even more things like power and earthquakes so subscribe if you want to see it but now we're getting to it number two on the list is probably one of the most fun and entertaining uses for a raspberry pi retro gaming ever since the pi zero and compute module 4 came out raspberry pi's have been integrated into all kinds of amazing gaming rigs from tabletop arcades to game boy style cases heck the pico even gets in on the action with pymoroni's pico system being a tiny retro handheld with a 1.5 inch display the pi 4 is powerful enough to emulate psp nintendo 64 and sega dreamcast games and anything older than that really and there are hundreds of different cases and boards that will trigger your nostalgia from the nest pie to this null 2 handheld which i built in a video last year linked below and finally we've come to it the number one pie project i recommend to anyone and everyone is to set one up as a pie hole pie hole is a network-wide ad blocker that does more than just block ads and no unlike some people i don't equate ad blocking with piracy hey there's a shirt for that redshirtjeff.com all kidding aside i tend to think of ad blocking more as a way to retaliate against the horrible disease that plugs most of the internet today and i know it more than most i used to work with a few of the largest media companies in america there was a constant push to add more and more tracking and personalized ads in their apps and websites and i fought hard against it but it was an impossible task you would be amazed at how much most large companies know about you based on your browsing history your social media use and what you watch across all these major platforms ad and tracker blockers like the pi hole help you fight back against tracking and personalization across the web and before you go in the comments talking about how i'm destroying creators lives by not watching ads i pay for youtube premium i subscribe to a number of sites i read i directly support a number of creators on patreon and github sponsors and you should do the same don't assume that people who use ad blockers just want to leech content for free off the internet besides add and tracker blocking pi hole also gives you control over your own dns a lot of shady isps even share your private browsing history with advertisers but if you take control of your own local dns with pihole you can avoid that problem finally the built-in local dns that pihul provides makes it easier to grow your own little home lab instead of trying to remember random ip addresses for your devices you can assign names to servers like i have my little gearly.net server over here and i can even access this ups at ups01.gearley.net and what if you're not at home well just log into your pi vpn and you can get that same protection wherever you are in the world well assuming you can reach your home internet and that you can keep it secure don't worry more videos on all that are coming later this year so subscribe and happy birthday to raspberry pi until next time i'm jeff gearling