Single-board computers are awesome little machines capable of doing some really cool things if you’re willing to go hands on and put in a bit of work. What’s even better is that there are dozens of communities online willing to share not only what they made with their SBCs, but how they made it. After countless hours scrolling through Reddit, X, and the Raspberry Pi forums, these are the projects I’ve found that are calling out to me to be built.

5 Smart Mirror

Unleash your inner maker

Single-board computers are wonderful for repurposing something mundane, and turning it into something more. Few projects exemplify this more than building a smart mirror using the open-source Magic Mirror software. What is a smart mirror? It’s essentially an SBC attached to a monitor mounted behind a two-way mirror.

Technically, a setup like this could work with any software, but it’s hard to beat the purpose-built solution made by Magic Mirror. The most powerful thing about Magic Mirror’s software is its modularity, which means you can customize it however you want. By default, Magic Mirror installs with the clock, calendar, weather, news, compliments, hello world, and alert modules. Even the modules are customizable, so you can choose your own weather API, and hand-pick your news feeds.

If you want to build your own, the hardest bit to source will be the custom cut bidirectional acrylic mirror, but do a Google search for “custom acrylic” and you’ll probably find something. There are tons of tutorials out there, but you can start with the one from Raspberry Pi to see everything that’s involved. You can even run Magic Mirror on a Pi Zero.

4 AI voice assistant

Who needs an Amazon Alexa?

Services like Alexa and Siri have been around for a while, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you can build something very similar with an SBC and open-source software. One of the most popular options out there is Mycroft and its ready-made build for Raspberry Pi, Picroft. If you want to skip the making bits, you can even buy a pre-built device that has the same open-source code, but comes with a speaker, microphone, and screen already incorporated.

So what can you do with an AI voice assistant? At the most basic level, you can use its voice generation capabilities to read to you. If you’ve got the e-book but not the audiobook, you can just have your SBC read it to you. If you really want to dig into what is possible, you can pair your AI voice with an LLM to create a talking chatbot.

To manage the software portion of this project, you’re going to need a decent SBC. For example, Mycroft will run on a Pi 3B, but it performs much better with a more powerful device. You’re also going to need at least a speaker and a microphone to interact with your new AI bestie.

3 Weather display

The best way to get ready for your day

As quotidian as the weather is, it’s a vital bit of information that informs how we approach the day. Most of you probably already have a weather widget on the homescreen of your phone or on your desktop taskbar, but the information presented is usually pretty minimal. By making a purpose-built device, you can fully customize what information you get, and how it’s presented.

There are dozens of tutorials on how to build weather displays online. Some of them are simple projects that scrape the web for your local weather data, others are more complex affairs involving E Ink screens, environmental sensors, and custom scripts. The beauty of this project is you can build exactly what you need, exactly how you want it.

Since making API calls and reading sensor input isn’t very processor heavy, you can accomplish this project with just about any SBC or basic microcontroller. When it comes to the display, you can choose anything from a basic portable monitor to a fancy E Ink display.

2 Pepper’s Ghost display

Bring the 19th century to life with your SBC

Pepper’s Ghost is an illusion technique popularized in the 19th century that makes ghost-like projections. Have you ever been to the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland? The ghosts were made using Pepper’s ghost. Remember the Tupac “hologram” from Coachella 2012? That was Pepper’s Ghost as well.

If you understand how a teleprompter works, then you understand the illusion. By projecting an image onto an angled sheet of reflective glass or plexiglass, you can make your image appear to be floating in space.

To make this project, you’re going to need glass or plexiglass on which to project your image, an emissive display to show your intended illusion, and an SBC capable of video output. You’ll also need some way of holding your setup together, so be prepared to flex those maker muscles.

1 Responsive LED backlight

Up your TV game with a little DIY

If you’re like me, you probably spend a lot of time in front of a screen. If that’s the case, you may as well get the most out of your experience. Responsive backlights are LEDs that are installed behind your TV or monitor and change color depending on what’s on the screen, providing a more immersive movie or gaming experience.

This is one of those projects that has lots of ready-made solutions available, but what fun is that? If you want to tackle this one on your own you’ll need a basic SBC, an HDMI capture card, and an LED lighting strip about as long as the perimeter of your TV or monitor. You can find a tutorial on RasperryPi.com that uses a Raspberry Pi Zero, but any SBC will work for this project.

There are a lot of SBCs to choose from

Because Raspberry Pis are the most popular SBC out there, you’ll find most of the tutorials online are focused on how to build projects using them, but there a lot of options out there when it comes to SBCs, so figure out the bare minimum you need to get your project done and choose your SBC based on that. Happy making!