OVER TO YOU

The Raspberry Pi is all about experimentation—so why not put together your own project? Here are some things we’d love to see; let us know if you’ve built a distro, come up with a combination of packages, or spotted something we’ve missed that can give the Raspberry Pi these capabilities.

›› A MUSIC MAKER

How about wiring up a series of arcade buttons to the Pi—à la the Midi Fighter, or the MPC— and using them to trigger samples? We’d need superlow latency to use it as a live instrument, knobs to tweak things as we play, and an easy way to add samples—maybe pulling them from whatever USB stick is plugged in.

›› A CHROMECAST CLIENT

Yes, you could just buy a Chromecast for less, but that’s not the point; a Pi that shows up on your network as a Chromecast would be superuseful, particularly if you could pair those capabilities with local media playback, and keep a file server running, too. A Chromecast is just a Chromecast—a Pi is so much more.

›› VIDEO VISUALIZER

You can already employ a HAT, such as the ReSpeaker, to cook up your own Amazon Echostyle smart assistant with the Raspberry Pi, but how about using it for something a little more fun? We want those twin mics to feed into a WinAmpstyle video visualizer to throw some serious shapes on to a projector at a party—and, please, throw in audio jukebox capabilities, too.

›› STREAM DECK CLONE

The Stream Deck, from Corsair’s now-subsidiary Elgato, is a cool but rather pricey tool for streamers, which uses a grid of OLED buttons to help you switch between scenes—we see no reason why a Pi with a touchscreen couldn’t be exploited in the same way.