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!

The post Celebrating Pi Day with some of your greatest hits appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

from News - Raspberry Pi https://ift.tt/CitqSdK