Raspberry Pi dilemma

5 December 2016

I’ve got two Raspberry Pis – a Pi 1 Model B (got it in 2013) and a Pi 2 Model B (got it from my uncle two days ago, who himself got a Pi 3 recently).

I’ve had the Pi 1 for a while but have yet to do anything meaningful with it. Whatever Python scripting I could learn on it could be done on my Mac or my Ubuntu desktop, thus leaving my first Pi without purpose. I fired up my second Pi yesterday but couldn’t find a good purpose for it either.

Initially, my dad and I considered using the Pi 1 for a family file server (where we’d connect one of our terabyte drives to it and access it via SMB). But then my uncle demonstrated that we could just hook up our drive directly to the router.

In uni, one of the Technical Documentation tutors showed off how she used her Pi to grab the XML data from the Australian Meteorology department’s site to push weather data to her Kindle. I personally found it more practical to just check a weather app on my phone for the weather, but I’m searching for a cool project like her weather tool but for a purpose more practical to me.