Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects around the home

[ReacherBadger]

Small, cheap computers like the Raspberry Pi and microcontrollers like the Arduino and ESP32 have opened up a whole world of home projects. For the price of a takeaway, you can build something that solves a problem in your own house, from automatic plant watering to a weather station in the garden. Many projects need only basic coding skills and a willingness to read tutorials

Popular projects include home media servers, network wide ad blockers like Pi-hole, retro gaming consoles, smart home hubs, security cameras and doorbell alerts. Microcontrollers are great for sensors, like temperature monitors, soil moisture alarms and motion triggered lights. Some people build huge home automation systems with Home Assistant, while others make one small gadget and leave it at that

My favourite project is a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole, which blocks adverts and trackers across every device on our home network. It took about an hour to set up and has run for three years with almost no attention. My partner did not notice anything except that websites loaded faster. It is one of the most useful things I have ever built

There have also been some fun failures. An automatic cat feeder that fed the cat at three in the morning, a weather station that blew away in a storm and a smart light that turned itself on during a film. Failures are half the fun with this sort of thing

What Raspberry Pi or Arduino projects have you built around the home? And which ones are worth trying for beginners?