While I’ve made many, many (many!) Raspberry Pi projects over the last decade or so for tutorials and such, I still get a little extra spark of joy when I’m making something outside of a work setting. Last month I wrote a guide on how to create some interactive streaming lights with a Raspberry Pi Pico and some NeoPixel LEDs, and that had started off life as a personal project. Using it in a context outside of the magazine in my day-to-day (sorta) life has a different level of novelty to me.

In plain sight

That’s not to say I never use Raspberry Pi around the house. At the very least, I always have a Raspberry Pi NAS running in the background, and I’ve had a Raspberry Pi media PC for about as long as media centre software has been available for Raspberry Pi. These utilitarian builds live in the background though and are a bit less creative or unique.

I think that’s one of the reasons Raspberry Pi has taken off so well. You can have a functional project, a seasonal project, or a more ostentatious one and Raspberry Pi or Pico is usually the best (and cheapest) thing to use for the job. It’s also how we can have many fantastic projects each month in the showcase section at the beginning of the magazine.

One more thing

There’s always another Raspberry Pi build I want to do. Right now, I’m thinking about interesting LED customisation of a LEGO castle or a Gunpla model, and maybe upgrading the decorations on my Christmas tree. Not sure why it’s mostly light stuff right now, but I’m sure something else will pique my interest – and when it does I’ll probably get to write about it for the magazine.

Whether you have an outlet like me for your project (and I understand my situation is fairly unique) shouldn’t really matter – what matters is whether or not you turn on your project and think “oh cool, I made that.” It’s certainly helped me through other parts of my life.