So, you bought a Raspberry Pi. It’s sitting in a drawer. Maybe you bought it during the Great Chip Shortage when prices were insane, or perhaps you grabbed a shiny new Pi 5 because the specs looked beefy. Now what? Most people just install RetroPie, play Super Mario World for twenty minutes, and let the dust settle on that tiny green circuit board. That’s a waste.
Honestly, the "coolest" stuff isn't always the flashiest. It’s the stuff that actually makes your digital life suck less. We're talking about taking back control from big tech companies, securing your home network, and maybe building a magic mirror just to feel like you're living in the year 2045.
The Raspberry Pi is basically the Swiss Army knife of computing. It's low-power, high-utility. It doesn't need a fan (usually), it doesn't complain, and it just works. Let’s get into some cool things to do on a Raspberry Pi that actually provide some utility beyond just being a conversation piece on your desk.
Kill every ad on your network with Pi-hole
If you haven't heard of Pi-hole, you're missing out on the single best use case for this hardware. It’s a DNS sinkhole. Think of it as a giant black hole for advertisements. Instead of installing an ad-blocker on every single browser on every single device, you install Pi-hole on your Pi and point your router to it.
Suddenly, the ads on your smart TV disappear. Those annoying banners in mobile games? Gone. It works by intercepting requests to known ad-serving domains and just... dropping them. It's glorious. Your internet feels faster because your devices aren't busy downloading 15MB of tracking scripts and video ads just to show you a weather report.
Setting it up is surprisingly easy. You just need a basic Raspberry Pi OS installation and a single command line. Keep in mind, it won’t stop YouTube ads—those are served from the same domains as the actual videos—but for the rest of the web, it’s a game-changer. It’s one of those projects where you set it up once and literally forget it exists until you visit a friend’s house and realize how cluttered the internet actually is.
Your own private Netflix: Plex and Jellyfin
Stop paying for five different streaming services. Or, at least, stop relying on them to keep your favorite shows forever. Licensing deals change. Shows vanish. If you have a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5, you have enough horsepower to run a media server.
Plex is the big name here. It looks professional and has apps for every TV and phone. But if you're a true open-source nerd, you’ll probably prefer Jellyfin. It’s completely free and doesn't lock features behind a "Pass."
You hook up a large external hard drive to the USB 3.0 port, dump your (legally acquired) movie files there, and the Pi serves them up to any device in your house. The Pi 5 is particularly good at this because it can handle 4K transcoding much better than its predecessors. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole—you start with one movie, and three months later, you’re looking at 14TB NAS setups—but starting on a Pi is the perfect gateway.
Building a "Magic Mirror"
This is the project that everyone sees on Pinterest and thinks, "I want that." It’s a one-way mirror with a monitor behind it. The Raspberry Pi runs a custom interface that shows you the time, your calendar, the weather, and maybe some news headlines. It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
It’s surprisingly doable.
The software side is handled by the MagicMirror² framework. It’s modular.
Want a compliment to pop up every morning? There’s a module for that.
Want to see your Fitbit stats? Module for that too.
The hard part is the carpentry. You have to build a frame and source the two-way glass. It’s a weekend project, but the payoff is huge. It turns a boring piece of hallway furniture into a functional command center. Plus, it’s a great way to repurpose an old computer monitor that’s been sitting in your garage since 2012.
Self-hosting a VPN with WireGuard
Public Wi-Fi is sketchy. We all know it. But using a commercial VPN often feels like you're just shifting your trust from your ISP to a random company in Panama. Why not be your own VPN provider?
Using WireGuard (via a tool like PiVPN), you can turn your Raspberry Pi into a secure gateway to your home network. When you’re at a coffee shop or traveling abroad, you "tunnel" back into your house. This has two major benefits:
- Your traffic is encrypted and secure from local snooping.
- You can access your local files and devices (like that Plex server) as if you were sitting on your couch.
WireGuard is incredibly fast. Unlike the older OpenVPN standard, it doesn’t kill your battery or slow your connection to a crawl. It’s lightweight enough that even an old Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W can handle it without breaking a sweat.
The "Everything" Hub: Home Assistant
Smart homes are a mess. You’ve got a Philips Hue app, a Nest app, a Ring app, and they all refuse to talk to each other. Home Assistant is the "one ring to rule them all." It’s an open-source platform that brings all your smart devices into one interface.
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The cool thing here is the automation.
You can make your lights dim when you start a movie on Plex.
You can have your smart blinds close if the temperature outside gets too hot.
It’s all local.
Privacy is the big sell here. Most smart home hubs send your data to the cloud. Home Assistant keeps it on your Raspberry Pi. If your internet goes down, your light switches still work. It's a steep learning curve, honestly. You’ll spend hours tweaking YAML files or building dashboards. But once it clicks, you'll never go back to the "walled garden" apps.
A dedicated Minecraft server
Yes, the Pi can do it. If you have a Pi 4 (8GB) or a Pi 5, you can run a surprisingly stable Minecraft server for you and a few friends. Don't expect to host 50 people with massive TNT explosions, but for a private survival world? It’s perfect.
Using PaperMC or Fabric helps optimize the performance. You’ll want to run it off an SSD instead of an SD card if you can, because Minecraft does a lot of read/write operations that will fry a cheap SD card in no time. It’s a great way to learn about Linux terminal commands and port forwarding without the risk of breaking a "real" computer.
The weird world of SDR (Software Defined Radio)
This is one of the more "niche" cool things to do on a Raspberry Pi. By plugging in a cheap USB RTL-SDR dongle, you can turn your Pi into a radio scanner. You can track planes overhead (ADSB tracking), listen to weather satellites, or even pick up data from smart utility meters in your neighborhood.
The most popular version of this is FlightAware. You set up your Pi to track aircraft positions and feed that data to the FlightAware network. In exchange, they usually give you a premium account for free. It’s a fun way to contribute to global data while learning how radio waves actually work.
What about the hardware?
People always ask if they need the newest model. Honestly? No.
- Pi Zero 2 W: Great for Pi-hole, VPNs, and tiny handhelds.
- Pi 4 (4GB/8GB): The sweet spot for media servers and Home Assistant.
- Pi 5: Use this for the Minecraft server or if you want to use it as a basic desktop replacement.
The SD card is usually the "weak point." Buy a high-end Endurance card (like the ones meant for dashcams) or, better yet, boot from a USB SSD. It makes the whole system feel five times faster.
Taking the next steps
If you're ready to actually do one of these, don't try to do them all at once. Start with Pi-hole. It’s the fastest win and provides the most immediate "quality of life" improvement.
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- Download the Raspberry Pi Imager on your main computer.
- Flash Raspberry Pi OS Lite (you don't need a desktop interface for a server) to your SD card.
- Enable SSH so you can control it from your laptop.
- Plug it into your router via Ethernet for the best stability.
Once you have the hang of the command line, look into Docker. It allows you to run multiple "containers" (like Pi-hole and a VPN) on the same Pi without their files getting all tangled up. It's the professional way to manage a "home server" and will save you a massive headache down the line when you decide you want to try the next cool project.