We use some essential cookies to make our website work.

We use optional cookies, as detailed in our cookie policy, to remember your settings and understand how you use our website.

Celebrating Pi Day with some of your greatest hits

Tomorrow is Pi Day, and to celebrate, we’ve compiled some of the most interesting Raspberry Pi projects from around the world. It would be brilliant if you could take to the comments section to show us some of your spectacular builds relying on just one person’s greatest-hits list (mine) is too big a burden to bear on such a momentous day.

British icons

If you visit the ‘For industry’ tab on our website, you’ll find loads of success stories explaining how Raspberry Pi hardware has provided a solution for an industrial challenge. One of my favourites has always been the Brompton case study, and it’s not just because the video shot is particularly lovely. Brompton’s folding bicycles are a British urban icon, and the fact that our tiny British-made computers are responsible for capturing data across their London factory is almost poetic.

Beaverheimer at MIT

2024 was a glorious year for Pi Day; Massachusetts Institute of Technology students recreated the film Oppenheimer with their beaver mascot in the lead role. I still can’t make sense of this celebration, so I’ll instead impart the interesting fact that a beaver was chosen as the mascot for the esteemed institute because the animal is thought of as “nature’s engineer”. Cute, right?

Pi measuring Pi

2023 was also a banner year for kooky celebrations. Apparently, some people celebrate Pi Day by measuring pi (π) with random objects. This was news to me when I stumbled across this fantastic post by Jim Hall, who had a go using a Raspberry Pi 3. All you need is some graph paper, a ruler, a pen, and one of our tiny computers. Hint: It’s to do with the mounting holes on our boards and their ability to help you draw a perfect circle.

It gets weirder still in the comments under the blog post I wrote about it. My head was spinning by that point.

Saving the ocean on the back of a turtle

The title pretty much sums it up. I know I mentioned this project on the blog recently, but I think it is my favourite ever. Arribada Initiative is responsible for developing this innovative solution while looking for a low-cost system to keep an eye on wildlife in complex environments without being too intrusive.

If you’ve ever wondered what a turtle-eye view of the sea looks like…

A Raspberry Pi Zero and one of our camera modules were enclosed in a lightweight, waterproof enclosure that attaches harmlessly to the shell of a sea turtle, capturing photos, video, and location data.

Teaching the next generation of engineers

It was pretty cool to learn that Cornell University’s entire Digital Systems Design Using Microcontrollers course was built around RP2040, the chip featured on our Raspberry Pi Pico boards. Since our first (e-)meeting, we’ve kept in touch with the professor responsible, and each year they send us a playlist of all the (often fun and silly) projects the latest cohort of students has created. The 2025 round-up featured lovingly generated pixel art of cows and a lightly harrowing heat-seeking quadruped robot.

The aforementioned lightly harrowing robot

To the comments section!

Rather than me wittering on about my niche list of favourites, let us engage with one another and share our favourite Raspberry Pi builds from around the internet.

It doesn’t have to have featured on the official Raspberry Pi blog — it could be from the most random Reddit tab you’ve had open since 2022, with the intention of recreating it yourself or sharing it at an opportune moment… LIKE THIS ONE!

13 comments
Jump to the comment form

PhilE avatar

What a selection. I’m probably suffering from recency bias, but this desktop OS running on a Pico 2 is ridiculous: https://itsfoss.com/news/frank-os/

Reply to PhilE

Helen Lynn avatar

Even though it looks like it’ll forever be a WiP, in over eleven years I have still not got over this Raman spectrometer project: /news/ramanpi/

Reply to Helen Lynn

Gman102 avatar

wild. today i just worked on a Mopec Grossing table. it was powered by a raspberry pi and acting slow. replaced the whole raspberry pi with a new one and solved the issue. sd card was fine.

Reply to Gman102

Jeunese Payne avatar

I like to sort my Lego by colour and shape, so it was fun to find out about Lego sorting using Raspberry Pi: /news/raspberry-pi-lego-sorter/

Reply to Jeunese Payne

bsimmo avatar

I made an LED blink today !

Reply to bsimmo

PhilE avatar

So did I – I bet my way was more complicated than yours.

Reply to PhilE

Jon Durrant avatar

Great that PI Day falls on a Saturday. Going to do a live build on my YouTube channel, https://YouTube.com/@drjonea
It will be based on Pico 2 W and how far i will get i just don’t know. Projects are a journey but fun.

Reply to Jon Durrant

Ripple Qubits avatar

Happy Pi Day everyone! To celebrate, I wanted to share a recent build of mine powered by the awesome Raspberry Pi Pico. It’s a fully 3D-printed, hand-wired 6-axis Space Mouse and Macro Keyboard designed for CAD software like Fusion 360. I put together a complete step-by-step guide with the CircuitPython code and schematics here:
https://www.instructables.com/Open-Source-Space-Mouse-and-Macro-Keyboard-Fusion-/
I’d love to hear what the community thinks of it!

Reply to Ripple Qubits

John B Sandlin avatar

I built a “MiniDexed” pi synth. It is like 8 Yamaha DX-7 synthesizers (minus keyboards) in one system. This used a Raspberry PI 4.

I have four blog pages describing the project:
https://sandlinsplace.net/?p=212
https://sandlinsplace.net/?p=240
https://sandlinsplace.net/?p=286
https://sandlinsplace.net/?p=291

Reply to John B Sandlin

Kritish Mohapatra avatar

I Built micropidash: a @micropython library that turns your ESP32/@Raspberry_Pi Pico W into a real-time web dashboard over WiFi. Zero dependencies, fully non-blocking 🚀
https://github.com/kritishmohapatra/micropidash

Reply to Kritish Mohapatra

Kritish Mohapatra avatar

Just crossed Day 66 of my 100 Days 100 IoT Projects challenge — building and documenting real-world IoT projects daily using MicroPython on ESP32, ESP8266 and Raspberry Pi Pico W. Everything is open source and beginner-friendly. Would love some feedback! 🔧
Repo: https://github.com/kritishmohapatra/100_Days_100_IoT_Projects

Reply to Kritish Mohapatra

Brian Jepson avatar

I have so many to choose from, but I’m a big fan of the Pico-powered SidecarTridge (https://sidecartridge.com/), which emulates a wide assortment of devices for Atari ST, STE, and Mega through the cartridge port. The developer keeps adding interesting enhancements and capabilities in software, too.

Reply to Brian Jepson

rclark avatar

I worked a bit with python on two RPI-5s here on PI Day. Concept was simple. From my ‘old’ Startrek console RPI-5, when a certain button is pressed, the other PiDP-1 RPI-5 would see it and and know that a simulated ‘paper’ tape was loaded. Then I could simply flip the ‘read-in’ switch on the front panel of the PiDP-1 to read it in. This avoids having to login via ssh, or have a local HDMI connection to read a new tape… That’s it in a nut-shell. I use another RPI-5 running my network redis server as the middle-man (used for a lot of projects) for data repository. Simple enough project for PI Day!

Reply to rclark

Leave a Comment