Raspberry Pis can find themselves in all kinds of places. They're small SBCs, and they can run off a battery for quite a while, so you can put them in pretty much any situation you like. Some people have discovered that they make a great wall decoration if you attach them to a screen, and now I love checking out projects which use them as magic mirrors, art pieces, and even games consoles. So, here are some projects you can hang on your walls if they're looking a little sparse.

4 You can build your own digital photo frame powered by Raspberry Pi: here’s how

A classic wall-mounted set-piece

Regular photo frames are so passe. Now that we have digital photos, we can build frames that automatically cycle through a gallery of pictures, which you can add to on the fly. Once it's built, stick it on the wall and you're good to go.

So, how do you get started? Well, our very own Jeff Butts broke down this Raspberry Pi photo frame project that you can use to make your own. Then, mount it on a wall and you'll have a digital photo frame to admire.

3 This cool Raspberry Pi Pico-8 wall arcade is like a painting you can play

Just grab a controller and you're good to go

If you're not one for photos or paintings, how about a full wall arcade? John Park on Adafruit created this project using a Pico-8 fantasy console, a screen, and a picture frame:

This project uses a Raspberry Pi 5 running Piomatter to drive a 128x128 pixel display made of four RGB LED matrices. A deep frame from IKEA plus some 3D printed brackets makes it straighforward to assemble.

The way this works is that PICO-8 is launched against XVFB (a virtual X framebuffer) so it thinks it's running on a really tiny monitor. But in reality, a python script (virtualdisplay.py) will grab that framebuffer and feed it to the LED matrices via Piomatter.

If you grab a controller, you can play games on it, and when it's time to do something else, you can leave the screen on "eye catcher" mode like a digital, moving art piece.

2 Someone turned a spare 24'' touchscreen into a home dashboard using a Raspberry Pi

Making a house a smart home

If you want something a little more practical, and you happen to just have a spare 24'' touchscreen just lying around, you can create a smart home hub for your wall. These double as a lovely setpiece for your space while also showing the latest news, weather forecasts, and incoming emails. Plus, if you have any smart home devices, you can hook it up to the hub and turn it into a giant remote control.

These projects are known as "magic mirrors," and to be a true "mirror," the screen has to let you see your own reflection in it while also displaying information. However, these days, the term mostly means "a screen put on the wall so you can mess around with it," and there are plenty of magic mirror projects out there.

1 Someone built a DIY wall-mounted NAS with Lego and a Raspberry Pi

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best

But who needs all those expensive screens and frames anyway? Sometimes, all you need is a little bit of ingenuity and the desire to drill Lego bricks into your wall. Such is the case of this project, which combined a Raspberry Pi, a storage drive, and a Lego enclosure to make a wall-mounted NAS. It may not have that professional look, but the additional costs must have been super low.

Adorn your walls with a Raspberry Pi today

If your walls are looking a little sparse, why settle for posters and paintings? Hopefully, you have some inspiration to add a more technological twist to your room.