After reporting the Raspberry Pi foundation was offering its latest unit for free with the £5.99 MagPi magazine, we asked readers to share the ideas and projects they’d been working on to get the best out of the British built computers.
The Raspberry Pi Zero sold out within days, but with other iterations having been on the market since 2012 there’s already a thriving community building on the foundation pieces of kit, with conventional add-ons as well as, well, slightly more eccentric items.
Some may have ripped up the engineering handbook and forgotten to search for a problem to solve in the first place (did we really need a bot to tweet Craig David lyrics?), but in each submission there was an admirable level of ingenuity and enthusiasm and a genuine passion for learning.
Below are a selection of our favourites – you can still get involved by clicking the blue GuardianWitness button or commenting below. Have you encountered alternatives to the Raspberry Pi? Maybe you’ve built something from scratch? If so, we’d love to hear about that too.
First up, it’s RoboCroc
RoboCroc
I used a Raspberry Pi to turn one of my children's old shoes into a robot :)
Next, and perhaps more practical, a novel way to keep an eye on household utility use
More monitoring from Will McGugan, who shared his entomological pursuits
Monitoring the nocturnal activities of exotic insects
This is a timelapse created with the Raspberry Pi and an infra-red camera. It shows 24 hours of the movements of a pair of Mexican Elephant beetles. The Pi takes photos at regular intervals and sends them to a web application, also running on the Pi.
Then there was this perhaps Instagram-inspired camera
Past and present tech collide in this BBC Micro project
This group of Quake fans were keen on the gaming capabilities of the Raspberry Pi
This musical mod has combined a Raspberry Pi 2 with an Arduino to breathe new life into the Sinclair ZX81
Sticking with audio, a smart way to give this modern hi-fi system a retro look
Many of you were keen to tout the Raspberry Pi’s educational capacities, and we were interested in this exploration of the internet of things
And how this budding billionaire might be on the right track with his machine
There was a sci-fi theme running through some contributions
We also wanted to celebrate some of the most pointless ways to spread joy ...
Lastly, something festive for those who feel Twitter should set the mood at this time of year
