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[miauw62]

So, I won a Raspberry Pi 2B about half a year ago, and now I finally have a screen to actually use it.
I've set everything up, got a wifi dongle installed since I don't have ethernet cables in my room.

Now all that's left is deciding what to actually do with it.
I am almost certainly going to be putting a bunch of emulators on it since I bought two USB SNES controllers, but there's probably more I can do with it. I just can't think of anything. So I'm asking B12 for suggestions.

(I also won an IR camera for the Pi)

[Sensei]

Buy servos, find face tracking library for use with camera.

Make rig that automatically points nerf gun at peoples' faces.

[Delioth]

Step 1: Make a pluggy port to hook it into your emulator system (i.e. all your cables and everything bound in a slightly slacked bundle to plug easily, and a nice mount for it to sit/hook into while playing to look nice and everything.

Step 2: Use it as such as you wish.

But since you have an IR camera on it... have a separate mount for it, that can sticky places. (with the IR camera.) Also maybe a usb speaker or something. Write a program for it that, once activated, powers on the IR, and waits for a solid 1/2 second or so signal. (resetting with each run, or wait 10 seconds to use last config). Proceed to sticky it to the back of your friend's TV, and set it to use a random button on the remote.

Make it do shennanigans when that button is pressed. - make a noise, send a notification somewhere, whatever.

I'm pretty sure the Pi will accept a USB power, and most TV's nowadays have USB ports, so it can even be powered by the TV it's messing with.

----------

Other neat uses include:
Using it as your own personal server (It's powerful enough to use for many games that do calculations and stuff client-side, where the server just functions as a router for it all)
Make a 'Netflix and Chill' button - press button (or on remote for bonus points) and it sends to your tv to give it control, accesses Netflix, and dims lights and stuff. Netflix has their procedure on their website.
Use it as a home controller instead of the expensive things from Staples or Best Buy. With sufficient programming knowledge it can even feel intuitive and work from your phone as well.
Run Dwarf fortress (May require a flash drive or two to actually store DF. Works significantly better on .34 and small population caps and embarks- no active world stuff and small trees really help with fps death, especially with such a little bugger.)
Make a tank- it's got the ports to drive wheels and launch rockets from one of the little usb rocket launchers, and since you're already wireless, you could make an app or program on your PC to control it. If you really wanted, you could even make it controlled by your tv remote (since IR camera).


NOTE: some of these suggestions may be using a definition of IR camera that is not the same as the IR camera you have.

[miauw62]

I really don't know what the camera is, exactly
The emulator idea also involved just being able to bring it to friends without too much trouble, since I just need the controllers and a phone charger.

Having a few mounts would be cool, though, the thing is so light that the cables I plug into it twist it around.

I don't really want to spend the money for stuff like automatic nerf guns or tanks, no matter how cool that would be
And we don't have Netflix, we use a local Belgian ISPs movie thing because we've had it since before Netflix was available here and doesn't count against our data cap. For DF I'll just stick to my rather beefy laptop, it's probably got more punch than the Pi.

Personal server I'm almost certainly going to do, since it being silent means I can just leave it on overnight, something I can't do with my repurposed 2008 desktop computer

[itisnotlogical]

I would use it as a home file server, like my journalism class in high school had set up. Put a document on the server, then you can access it from any device on the local network. It was a pretty cool setup tbh, about the only computer thing that looked competently done at my high school

If you're into hacking and modding, I'd suggest building an emulator console in the case of a GBC or whatever portable you find most nostalgic. Or you could always build your own case.

[jaked122]

Buy crt tv. Remove screen. insert raspberry pi. Remove power supplies and components of tv. Have a small computer inside a very large box.

Feel like a big man.

Alternatively, attach it to a bunch of random motors, don't do anything useful with them, just attach them so that they can run.

[BigD145]

retro pi and/or osmc
Each microsd card can be its own thing.

[wierd]

Newer versions of the Eltechs Exagear Desktop (buyware, 30$) are tailored for raspberry pi 2 series boards. This would permit you to run x86 code on it, making it potentially be able to run some older windows software via WINE, or even run dwarf fortress. (DF Linux has already been tested and known working with Exagear Desktop on an open pandora portable. There's an old thread in the DF fortress mode forum about it.)

Just in general, I would strongly suggest setting up and using the zram module as swap on the Pi.  The Pi has very limited ram, and SDCards are not the greatest devices to use for swap drives/files. Zram really shines on memory constrained and slow IO devices like the Pi.  Typical compression ratios with zram are .4 to .5, or about 50% reduction in size compared to uncompressed anonymous data pages. The compression/decompression is reasonably fast (Much faster than swapping to SDCard anyway), and can allow the Pi to run software that it otherwise could not without bogging down hard.

Otherwise?  Short of making a DIY autonomous drone and making the FAA pissed at you, the Pi is useful for anything that you would want a very small computer for.  Home theater PC-- Home automation system, DIY router, file/print server, Slave TOR exit node, Torrent box, you name it. About the only thing it wouldnt be good for is bitcoin mining. CPU isnt beefy enough for good performance with block-chain computation.

[BigD145]

A more command line version of Windows 10 works on Pi.

Exagear is $25 US.

[uber pye]

try to get it to run Doom

[wierd]

Doom has a FOSS engine port; It should be possible to get it to run natively, if you dont mind a recompile. I dont see a native ARM Doomsday engine port, but I suspect that since it has been ported to various other processor architectures before, that it should be a fairly straight forward process of just using a cross-compiler.

Once you have the native engine running, you just run it.

Failing that, run the original dos version in Dosbox. No challenge there. There's already a native ARM build of dosbox in Raspbian's repos.

[BigD145]

I'm pretty sure RetroPie has Doom all ready.

[wierd]

Yup, looks like it.

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Doom


Another fun thing that you could potentially use the Pi for, is controlling strings of LED lights. It has plenty of GPIO pins that you could use to signal light controllers with.