December 25, 2018 by Dmitry Rogov
Raspberry Pi LED blinking lights and other things to do with Raspberry Pi these holidays
Raspberry Pi LED Blinking Lights And Other Things to Do With Raspberry Pi These Holidays
Pi projects are represented by a great variety nowadays. Thus, this great diversity of things to do with Raspberry Pi scales up during such days as Christmas holidays. This happens not only due to the amount of free time that avid makers usually have during the Christmas holidays. Also because of a surge in demand for automation solutions and smart IoT products that actually comprises the best uses for Raspberry Pi technology.
To inspire thousands of our daily visitors we’ve made a chart of the best Raspberry Pi projects for Christmas. Read up to the end to learn the most proficient ones.
What can be a better Christmas gift than an all-in-one all-times gaming console, allowing you to play almost any console game ever created? Only the one with extended functionality, allowing you to play retro PC games on the same device! And we’ve done that! Learn all the details in our Retropie Retro Gaming console on Raspberry Pi complete tutorial.
To prepare such a marvelous Christmas present you will need:
you are a kid reading this now, for you we must say – Yes, this is a real Santa detection device. As soon as it beeps, open your eyes wide and catch this benevolent old man!
For our adult readers – this is a kind of a programmable toy-device for imitating the detection of a motion of a special person under tracking. The device is generally based on Raspberry Pi infrared sensors which activate an alarm signal as soon as someone is detected.
For this project you will need:
The details have been kindly represented on the Raspberry Pi Foundation special website section – read here.
Some Christmas advents are held annually and this always starts different dates. The good decision not to miss even a minute of your beloved Christmas action is to set up the automatic LED advent candles. They are going to switch an automatically as soon as the start of advent is announced.
For Such project you will need:
The Author of the project is Drew Fustini. Full description is here.
For those of you who love video demonstrations, watch below.
Memorable moments must be shot on the camera. All of them. But what would you do if you drown or destroy your smartphone somehow in the middle of the Christmas party? Always keep this indispensable photo booth made on Raspberry Pi around! you’ll have to prepare some 3D printed components in advance. Also, constructing a unique background for your photo booth will make this even more attractive for your guests.
Basically, to realise your own Christmas Photo Booth you’ll need:
This marvelous project has been kindly described by Kevino, Justin Shaw and Jenny Ching on our favorite Make Magazine here.
If If you’ve got some old laptop, give it a second within a new smart thing which can really accompany these holidays – a smart mirror. With such a mirror The idea is simple: you can not only see your reflection but also gain very useful information, like the weather forecast, latest news, stock markets… You can even display the latest twits form your friends – the limitation is your imagination only!
To make this great project you won’t need a lot!
The author, James Bruce from Make Use Of, kindly describes his project here.
Christmas Tree Home Automation
When people decorate the house with great trees and lights on them, the controlling those lights becomes a real issue. To make them blink, perform different sequences or even adjusting the lights brighter or dimmer makes you come up and switch on something with your hands. But what if you could do it remotely and with your own voice?
Alex Ellis made this come true. Here is the project which combines Alexa speaker with Raspberry Pi Zero W into a new Christmas home automation kit.
As it’s been mentioned in the previous case that one of the best Christmas decorations are lights. But how to do such controllable and adjustable lights system for the entire house, not just for a Christmass tree? Obviously, this is a project of a bigger scale. This case is explained in details by David W – an RPi maker who’s got a youtube channel. Just watch the video below.
Raspberry Pi Media Center for a Party
One of the most important parts of Christmas, after dinner with the family, is the Christmas Party! The tree is decorated, lights are ready, the presents are prepared, so the only thing left is the entertainment. The best solution for that would be a simple and reliable media center for collecting, keeping and playing back all the music, video, photo and other media when the moment requires.
Basically, you may be really interested to get Plex Media Server ready for your Christmas party. Just use our detailed tutorial for that.
You may also need Spotify on your Raspberry Pi media center to help you easily manage your party music. Also, add Netflix service to offer some beloved Christmas TV-shows or movies to your guests.
For all of these cases, you will only need a Raspberry Pi device and some basic programming skills. In case you don’t have them, just read our tutorials (↑).
Interesting type of a Christmass tree decoration is going to be a digital photo frame built on Raspberry Pi. Besides, it can really amaze your guests. Moreover, just connect it to your smart RPi media center (↑) and display anything you like. Techie!
For this IoT thing you’d better prepare:
Though the idea of making up a photo frame was offered by some unknown hobbyist, the best description of the project was made by Gus from PiMyLifeUp in his post.
Probably, one of the most discussed project on the web and, especially, on Youtube. The author of the project is Estafannie De la Garza. Her smart Gingerbread house can play music, and can be controlled remotely from an iPad: turn on and off its lights, close and open its door, make two gingerbread men inside dance. Also, the house is responsive and reacts to the approaching objects (the way you set up choosing from the available moving options). Look yourself, Estafannie describes everything very clearly in her video ⤵.
A DIY Raspberry Pi powered fireplace with Neopixel LED strips is what you really need for a cool thematic Christmas Party! =)
Though such a fireplace won’t make a space around any warmer, it can really create a good atmosphere for the evening. Brian Federico, the author of this project, describes all the mounting, programming and even dealing with woodworks on his blog.
This fireplace will require:
Frosty the Spyman
This item is called “Frosty the SPyman” because it is a kind of disguised video surveillance for your home. This is a toy Snowman with a digital surveillance camera, which can live stream video and even follow the objects. In the context of general holiday decorations, it’s the perfect way to monitor if everything is OK at home, or in a particular room. Especially, if you’ve got kids and infants in the house.
For that unit you’ll need:
And the software:
Holiday lights are a classic, and smart lighting with a Raspberry Pi adds a modern twist. This project uses Twitter to control lighting with various hashtags and mentions. This impressive project described by Raymond Jones and Chris Poplawski in this document.
The project consists of the two types of components: hardware and electronic.
For the hardware you need to get:
The electronic components include:
We consider this as one of the most complicated, outstanding and well-prepared projects. The core idea is to make up an animation system, which reacts to the rhythm and music and makes the lights flash accordingly. In his project, Christian Kratky combines a Raspberry Pi device, C# and Windows 10 IoT Core.
For a complete system you will need (both hardware and software):
Remember this Santa Detector we’ve mentioned earlier in this article. Make a step up and create the Santa Tracker, which imitates the moving of St Nicolas displayed on a digital world map. Great fun for kids on Christmas Holidays.
For that device you will need the following hardware and software:
The full project description is made by Bowen Feng and can be found here.
Animated Smart Elf
A very simple in functionality but quite complicated in production is a smart Toy Christmas Elf. It can only wave his hand when someone approaches it. But still, it uncovers the power of Raspberry Pi technologies and the variety of uses for different types of sensors. All the details of the project read here.
To build this funny Christmas toy, you will need:
Again, this is an IoT smart toy whose aim is accurate and joyful delivery. The robot will move according to the programmed route and carrying whatever you wish on board. As we are talking about Christmas holiday the bot was made Christmas reindeer style and decorated with a couple of deer and … the Elf! (↑)
Besides delivery, the Robot can also sin songs via its speaker and accompany itself with lights animation through the LED lights. Read the full description here.
To make this wonder, prepare the following:
Greet yourselves and your guests with music as soon as you or they enter the room. The idea is based on Raspberry Pi and a couple of sensors. The sound is activated when the door is opened and the signal between the two resistors is terminated. Find all the details on Ian Buckley’s MakeUSeOf blog here.
Of course, there are much more Raspberry Pi projects. We have chosen the brightest ones (to our opinion). Obviously, these are the makers, who create all the valuable things, are making all this possible. So, our company, Eltechs, which is into software development is doing its best in helping such makers and enthusiasts throughout the entire world.
ExaGear Desktop software can help them by widening programming possibilities of Raspberry Pi hardware merging x86 and ARM-based core architectures.
I am a maker, software developer, and a digital tech marketer at https://eltechs.com/
