What Can You Do With a Raspberry Pi Touchscreen?
Are you looking for some great ideas to turn your Raspberry Pi touchscreen from a simple gadget into a useful device? You have arrived at the right place. Raspberry Pi is an affordable single-board computer that is almost as small as a credit card. However, you shouldn’t be fooled by its size and think that it doesn’t have any computing power. This couldn’t be further away from the truth! You can use a Raspberry Pi touchscreen to create lots of amazing devices, starting with smart mirrors and ending with photo frames. The possibilities are endless. Today we have gathered our top 6 ideas for Raspberry Pi but before we get into it, let’s go ahead and check out a short summary of the tech behind the computer.
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What is Raspberry Pi?
Those who are unfamiliar with Raspberry Pi or are just getting started in the tech world should know that Raspberry Pi is one of the cheapest computers you can get. The computer is super small, and it can be plugged into a monitor or a TV. To make things even better, Raspberry Pi supports the standard mouse and keyboard setup. Therefore, you can use the computer for almost anything you can usually do on a regular PC or laptop, obviously not something that requires a lot of CPU and GPU power.
Even though it might seem like Raspberry Pi can’t do that many things, skilled coders can push the device to its limits and transform it into lots of useful devices such as the smart mirror presented on our list. The computer is capable of doing everything that a desktop device does, and it supports many programming languages such as Scratch and Python. From standard music players to weather stations, you can do lots of fun things Raspberry Pi.
Top Six Things You Can Do with a Raspberry Pi Touchscreen
#1 Photo Frame
We will kick things off with the easiest project that you can do with a Raspberry Pi touchscreen. Since the display measures seven inches (diagonally), this makes it perfect for a photo frame. However, this will not be an ordinary photo frame that only displays a single picture. You can use an ethernet cable to create a wireless connection and enable the frame to pull images from pre-populated directory. You can select all your favorite family pictures and have them change every thirty-minutes. If you place the Photo Frame on your office desk, you will always have your loved ones close to you. To make things even better, you can do all of this with only a couple of Python code lines.
#2 Smart Mirror
Now that you have a Raspberry Pi touchscreen, you can ditch your HDMI cables! One of the coolest things that you can do with this device is a smart mirror. The mirror will show your reflection, but that’s not all. It will also display useful information such as headlines from your favorite news source and weather updates, among others. The only tricky part about creating a smart mirror is that you will need a larger Raspberry Pi touchscreen. While coding a smart mirror might seem complicated, you don’t have to do it all on your own. There are hundreds of how-to guides on YouTube that will teach you how to code a smart mirror.
#3 Raspberry Pi Carputer
If you love modifying your car and improving the “under the hood” performances, we have some great news to share with you. You can use the Raspberry Pi touchscreen to create a “Carputer.” You can use the OBD-II interface that will automatically gather important information about your car and display it on the screen. Things don’t end here. You can take it to the next level and use the Carputer as a satnav that helps you reverse parking. We need to highlight that installing a Raspberry Pi touchscreen in your car requires you to install a user interface, power supply and connect to the car’s hardware. Therefore, you might need to contact a specialist.
#4 Touchscreen Internet Radio
Do you enjoy listening to the radio when working around the house or in the office? If yes, you should be pleased to know that the Raspberry Pi touchscreen can be used to build a Touchscreen Internet Radio. There are numerous guides on the internet, and if you choose to use the Adafruit touchscreen display for Raspberry Pi, you will have an easy time setting up the Touchscreen Internet Radio. Finding your favorite radio station will never be easier. You will have all the local top-rated stations available at the touch of a single finger.
#5 Raspberry Pi Tablet
Who says that you need to pay hundreds of dollars for a tablet? You can use the Raspberry Pi touchscreen to create your own tablet. The only things you need are the Raspberry Pi that will be connected to the touchscreen tablet and a rechargeable battery pack to provide the required power. On the downside of things, you might want not want to go for the traditional default Raspbian Jessie with PIXEL because it doesn’t work too well with a touchscreen-based interface. Luckily, there are many Android versions that are compatible with Raspberry Pi.
#6 Photo Booth
There are many things that you can do with a Raspberry Pi touchscreen, and one of our favorite ideas is a photo booth. You only need to use a Raspberry Pi, webcam, the touchscreen display, and a thermal printer. Although, you can opt for a standard color printer because the thermal printer only provides low-resolution images. Nonetheless, this a fun idea for Raspberry Pi, and you will certainly surprise your family with it.
Final Words
As you can see in the list featured above, there are many fun things that you can create with a Raspberry Pi touchscreen. The internet is packed with how-to guides that will guide you every step of the day. Therefore, we are advising everyone to go even for the challenging projects such as the smart mirror or Carputer because you will find answers to all of your coding or hardware questions with a simple internet search.
