Top Raspberry Pi Mechatronics Projects

Armed with an affordable Raspberry Pi and some other materials, you can create all kinds of electronic devices, from those that serve practical purposes to others that entertain and improve your leisure time. Along the way, you may also find that you have a burgeoning interest in the mechanisms and computer coding that go into completing the appliances and gadgets that you are constructing. You can start by checking out these top Raspberry Pi mechatronics projects to try out. Each one has easy-to-find tutorials you can follow with a quick search on the internet.

Weather Station

Most of us rely on the weather readings available on the local news station or our smartphone apps. You can go a step further by putting together your own personal weather station using a Raspberry Pi and Sense Hat add-on. The Sense Hat is a board that contains sensors for temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, among others. When assembled with the Raspberry Pi, which can interpret its collected data, your weather station can monitor the precise conditions in a specific room or right outside your home, depending on where you place it.

Surveillance Motion Capture Camera

If you want to boost the security around your house at a low cost, a Raspberry Pi, along with a USB camera, can form the basis for a surveillance system. You can install Motion on it, which is open-source software that will allow your system to detect when something moves in its line of vision and start recording video when it occurs. On top of storing regular video, you can set it to take pictures and create time-lapse videos as well. Live video is accessible via any web browser when you enter the name you’ve set for your Raspberry Pi, followed by a colon and the port number (with no spaces).

Minecraft Device

Minecraft is a popular multi-platform game where players can build tools and structures limited only by their imagination. It’s popular among children, but you might not be so keen on getting them an entire gaming system or brand-new computer just for that one game, especially if they’re still young. Raspberry Pi can come to the rescue in this situation, as you’re able to treat it like a simplified PC, uncluttered by the many extraneous applications that standard home computers would come with.

Bring together the Raspberry Pi with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and install the Raspbian operating system to form your Minecraft-dedicated device. Then, you’ll need to pay for the game itself and follow a brief guide on how to set it up. You may notice that there is a version of the game called Minecraft Pi available for free, which you can choose instead of the full version. Minecraft Pi is simplified and specifically designed to teach kids how to use Python.

Get started in these top Raspberry Pi mechatronics projects by visiting Chicago Electronic Distributors online. We stock raspberry pi project kits in our web store that you can use to try your hand at any number of cool ventures.