Recently I received my first Raspberry Pi, the incredible credit card sized computer, while I was awaiting it’s arrival I had a seemingly endless stream of ideas flowing through my brain of what I could use this tiny computer for, however now that I have it, and it’s all set up and ready to start working towards whatever task I assign to it, I’m lost for ideas.

so tiny, so useful, but what to do with you?

I’ve had a few nifty ideas, however nothing has jumped out at me as an essential use for the device, my ideas so far are as follows:

Media Center

the very pretty XBMC media center

One thing that the Pi would be obviously great for is a media center, I could simply get XBMC running on there, and with it’s smooth 1080p video playback this seems like the obvious choice.. however, I already have a BoxeeBox which is fulfilling that role in my home just fine, so why go to the trouble of setting up my tiny new computer to do the same thing?

Retro Gaming Rig

Another very tantalizing idea that came to mind was to get this sucker loaded up with games from days gone by, buy myself a controller, and go nuts. The thing stopping me from going ahead with this is that I already have a PS3 set up and ready to go, so I can play all the modern games I want, as well as that I feel like I’m 3 clicks away from playing any retro game on my notebook anyway, so again I feel like I’d be going to all this effort to set up something that I already have.

At this point, I’m feeling like all of my other devices allow me to do everything I’d want to do with the Pi, however none of my ideas thus far has really taken advantage of the Pi’s strengths: Weight and Size

Hobbyists “Black Box”

But will it fly with a Pi attached?

One really neat idea I had was to get the Pi stuck/taped to a remote control airplane/car/helicopter, with a small webcam attached and recording everything it sees, this would be something really fun to get working and to play with, however there’s almost no practical use for this, other than watching the in flight video footage of your plane flying around in the park before it crashes (and possibly breaks the Pi itself). So this one is a maybe, seeing as I have no remote controlled goodies at the moment either.

Security/Doorbell cam

Direct feed of the pizza guy!

I had one actually useful idea for what the Pi could do, set it up as a camera looking from my front door, as the door of my unit has no viewer to look through and see who’s there, I think this would actually come in handy from time to time, or at least be entertaining. I’m not sure of the legality of recording video of the common area in my unit block, but I’m sure it would be fine if I just set up a streaming server to log in to locally, and programs like Motion allow you to set up a http server with a live feed of a webcam, so this might just be the project I’m looking for.

Do you have any ideas for what this nifty little device can be useful for around the house? If so feel free to leave a commend below and give me more ideas!