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Your First Projects

One project per Pi class — each teaches a real skill, each finishes in an evening.

Pi 4/5: Pi-hole (network-wide ad blocking)

The classic first server project, and genuinely useful forever after.

curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash

(The installer is interactive and walks you through it.) Then point your router's DNS at the Pi's IP. Every device on your network stops seeing most ads, and the Pi-hole dashboard shows you which devices phone home the most — an education in itself.

Skill learned: DNS, DHCP integration, running a real network service.

Zero 2 W: temperature logger

A $15 computer, a $5 sensor, and the smallest useful IoT device:

sudo apt install python3-pip
pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-dht --break-system-packages

(Use --break-system-packages here deliberately — it's a single-purpose Pi, not a shared Python environment. On a Pi you develop on, prefer a venv; see the Python guide.)

Wire a DHT22 to the GPIO pins, log readings to a file every minute via cron, and you've built a thing that senses the physical world — the whole point of the GPIO header.

Skill learned: GPIO, cron, the sensor-to-data pipeline.

Pi 5: NVMe boot (kill the SD card)

The project that makes every later project better:

  1. Attach an M.2 HAT+ and NVMe SSD
  2. Flash Raspberry Pi OS directly to the NVMe (Imager supports it)
  3. Set the boot order: sudo raspi-config → Advanced → Boot Order → NVMe first

Check:

lsblk -d -o NAME,TRAN | grep nvme

nvme0n1  nvme

and confirm root is on it: findmnt -n -o SOURCE / shows /dev/nvme0n1p2.

Skill learned: bootloaders, storage hierarchy, why "disk" stopped meaning one thing.

On a microcontroller, the ladder is: blink an LED (GPIO works) → read a button (input works) → connect to Wi-Fi (network works) → publish a sensor reading over MQTT (it's a real IoT device). Each rung is ten lines of MicroPython. The Arduino guide covers this mindset in depth — the Pico is just the Pi family's entry in that world.

Pi 4: the fleet monitor

Dedicate the whole box to watching your other machines: a cron job that pings each host, checks SSH, and messages you when something's down. One computer, one job, boring and reliable — the Pi philosophy at its best. (A second Pi as monitor-for-the-monitor is not paranoia; it's the logical conclusion.)