What Can You Do with a Raspberry Pi and OpenClaw in 2026

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold over 75 million units since 2012, making it the best-selling British computer in history. That number is not just hobbyist enthusiasm. A Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer that can run a full Linux operating system, control sensors and motors through GPIO pins, and serve as the foundation for hundreds of DIY projects from home servers to AI-powered cameras. That is not useful if you want to actually build something. This guide covers ten projects across six categories, each with a difficulty rating, estimated cost, and enough detail to help you decide whether it fits your goals. If you are interested in running AI agents, the later sections cover how OpenClaw turns a Pi into a persistent, always-on agent host with cloud storage through Fast.io.

Category: Networking Difficulty: Beginner Cost: $45-70 (Pi only, no extra hardware) Time to set up: 30 minutes Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole that blocks ads, trackers, and malware domains for every device on your network. Instead of installing browser extensions on each phone, laptop, and tablet, you point your router's DNS to the Pi and ads disappear everywhere, including in mobile apps and smart TV interfaces where browser extensions cannot reach. The Pi handles DNS resolution for your entire household. When a device requests an ad domain, Pi-hole returns a null response and the ad never loads. You can whitelist specific domains through the web dashboard if a site breaks. The DNS workload is so light that even a first-generation Pi handles it without noticeable latency. Installation is a single curl command that walks you through network configuration, and the web interface shows real-time query logs, top blocked domains, and per-client statistics. For anyone who has never touched a Raspberry Pi, this is the project to start with. You get a useful result in under an hour, the setup process teaches you SSH access and basic Linux administration, and the improvement is immediately visible on every device in your home.

What you need: Any Raspberry Pi model, a microSD card with Raspberry Pi OS Lite, and an Ethernet connection to your router. Wi-Fi works but Ethernet is more reliable for a DNS server.

Category: Media and Entertainment Difficulty: Beginner Cost: $100-130 (Pi + case + power supply) Time to set up: 45 minutes LibreELEC is a minimal Linux distribution built to run Kodi and nothing else. Flash it to a microSD card, plug the Pi into your TV via HDMI, and you have a media center that plays local video files, streams from network shares, and supports add-ons for live TV, podcasts, and music libraries. If you have a NAS or a hard drive full of media files, the Pi mounts network shares over SMB or NFS and presents everything through Kodi's interface with metadata, cover art, and subtitle support. A CEC-compatible TV lets you control Kodi with your existing TV remote, no extra hardware needed. The Pi sends and receives CEC commands over the HDMI cable, so play, pause, navigate, and volume all work from the couch. Kodi's add-on ecosystem covers radio stations, YouTube, Twitch, podcast aggregators, and PVR backends for recording live TV with a USB tuner.

Category: Networking and Privacy Difficulty: Intermediate Cost: $70-95 (Pi only) Time to set up: 1 hour PiVPN wraps WireGuard (or OpenVPN) in a guided installer that turns your Pi into a VPN endpoint in about ten minutes. Once running, you can tunnel all your phone or laptop traffic through your home network from anywhere, which gives you access to local devices and encrypts your connection on public Wi-Fi. WireGuard is the better protocol choice for a Pi. It uses less CPU than OpenVPN, establishes connections faster, and handles roaming between Wi-Fi and cellular without dropping the tunnel. The practical use case here is security on public networks and access to home resources. Connect to your VPN from a coffee shop and your traffic is encrypted end-to-end to your home. You can also reach your NAS, printer, Home Assistant dashboard, or any other device on your LAN as if you were sitting at home. DuckDNS is free and works well with the Pi.

Store and share your Raspberry Pi agent output in one workspace

Fast.io gives your OpenClaw agent cloud storage with built-in search, version history, and shareable links. Starts with a 14-day free trial.

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Category: Storage and Backup Difficulty: Intermediate Cost: $130-220 (Pi + USB drive or SSD) Time to set up: 2 hours The Pi 5's USB 3.0 ports and PCIe 2. Connect a USB SSD or use a PCIe NVMe HAT, install OpenMediaVault, and you have a file server that draws under 10W while serving media, backups, and shared folders to every device on your network. OpenMediaVault is a Debian-based NAS operating system with a web interface for managing storage, users, shares, and services. It supports SMB/CIFS for Windows and macOS, NFS for Linux, and SFTP for secure remote access. You can configure RAID-like redundancy with SnapRAID and MergerFS if you connect multiple drives. For heavier workloads, a PCIe NVMe drive through the M. The power advantage is the real selling point. For a household that just needs shared storage and automated backups, the Pi NAS is hard to beat. If your NAS needs extend beyond local access, cloud storage platforms like Fast.io complement a Pi NAS by giving you a shareable layer on top. Upload critical files from your NAS to a Fast.io workspace. Fast.io offers storage and agent tooling for testing this workflow, with a 14-day free trial. Your local NAS handles speed; the cloud handles sharing and redundancy.

Category: Home Automation Difficulty: Intermediate Cost: $120-165 (Pi + Zigbee coordinator) Time to set up: 2-4 hours (plus ongoing device pairing) Home Assistant is the most popular open-source home automation platform, and the Raspberry Pi is its most common deployment target. The critical advantage over cloud-dependent systems like Google Home or Alexa is that everything runs locally. Your automations keep working when your internet goes down. Your device data stays on your network. And you are not locked into a single vendor's ecosystem. Mix IKEA bulbs, Aqara sensors, Sonoff switches, and Ring cameras in a single dashboard with automations that span all of them. One coordinator replaces the Hue Bridge, Aqara Hub, and IKEA DIRIGERA. Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) handle device pairing and expose every device to Home Assistant automatically. Automations are where Home Assistant earns its reputation. More complex flows like "if nobody is home and the temperature drops below 15C, set the thermostat to 18C and send me a notification" use the same drag-and-drop interface.

Category: Gaming Difficulty: Beginner Cost: $100-140 (Pi + controllers + case) Time to set up: 1 hour The installation process is straightforward: flash the RetroPie image to a microSD card, plug in a controller, and transfer ROM files to the Pi over your network. EmulationStation provides a polished frontend with box art, descriptions, and per-system sorting. Controllers are auto-detected, and the initial setup wizard maps buttons for you. USB and Bluetooth controllers both work. 8BitDo makes wireless controllers specifically designed for retro gaming that pair over Bluetooth with zero configuration. If you prefer wired, any USB gamepad works out of the box. The Pi's four USB ports let you plug in controllers for local multiplayer without adapters. For a clean living room setup, cases like the Argon NEO, Retroflag NESPi, or Pimoroni Picade give the Pi a console-like appearance.

Category: AI and Machine Learning Difficulty: Intermediate Cost: $220-300 (Pi 5 + AI HAT+ + Camera Module 3) Time to set up: 2-3 hours The setup uses rpicam-apps with Hailo post-processing. Pre-trained models for object detection (YOLOv8), pose estimation, and semantic segmentation run out of the box. The Hailo accelerator handles inference while the Pi's CPU manages the camera pipeline, network, and application logic. This split architecture means you can run detection and simultaneously stream the annotated feed over RTSP or serve it through a web interface. Practical applications range from a wildlife camera that identifies bird species and logs sightings to a security camera that alerts you only when a person (not a cat) enters the frame. Frigate, the NVR software mentioned in the Home Assistant section, supports the Hailo accelerator directly, so you can combine AI camera detection with your smart home automations. 2) entirely on-device, though the practical output quality is best suited for structured tasks like classification and summarization rather than open-ended conversation.

Category: AI Agents Difficulty: Intermediate Cost: $70-95 (Pi only, plus LLM API costs) Time to set up: 1-2 hours OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent framework that turns a Raspberry Pi into a persistent, always-on agent host. The Pi does not run the language model itself. What the Pi provides is persistence, isolation, and GPIO access that a cloud VM does not have. The skill system is what separates OpenClaw from a simple API wrapper. Skills are markdown files that extend the agent's capabilities. ClawHub, the community skill registry, hosts thousands of skills covering web search, file management, code execution, data analysis, and hardware control. Install a skill by dropping a file into a directory, and the agent gains new abilities without code changes. A common starter workflow: install OpenClaw on a headless Pi, connect a Telegram channel, and add skills for web search and file management. You now have a personal AI assistant that lives in your pocket, runs on your hardware, and does not depend on any company's consumer product continuing to exist. For file storage and handoff, Fast.io works well with OpenClaw agents. Fast.io offers storage and agent tooling for testing this workflow, with a 14-day free trial. The agent writes files to a Fast.io workspace through the MCP server, and you (or a colleague) access them through the web interface or API. When a project is done, ownership transfer lets the agent hand off the entire workspace to a human. This pattern, where the agent builds something and a person receives it, is central to how agentic teams work. js, an API key from an LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google), and a messaging account for the input channel.

Category: Development and Learning Difficulty: Beginner to Intermediate Cost: $70-95 (Pi only) Time to set up: 1 hour A Raspberry Pi running Nginx or Caddy serves static websites and lightweight web applications well enough for personal projects, portfolios, internal tools, and development testing. js, Python Flask, and Go backends at reasonable scale for personal use: hundreds of concurrent connections without issues. For learning web development, the Pi is a better environment than localhost on your laptop. It forces you to think about deployment from the start: SSH access, firewall rules, domain configuration, TLS certificates (Caddy handles these automatically with Let's Encrypt), and process management with systemd. These are the same skills you need to deploy to a VPS or cloud instance, practiced on hardware you fully control. Most popular images (Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, Node, Python) have ARM64 variants. Docker Compose lets you define multi-container applications, so you can run a web app with a database and cache on a single Pi for development or internal use. The Pi also works as a Git server. Gitea is a lightweight, self-hosted Git service that runs on the Pi with a web interface for managing repositories, issues, and pull requests. For a small team or personal use, it replaces GitHub for private repositories without monthly costs.

Category: IoT and Sensors Difficulty: Intermediate Cost: $80-120 (Pi + sensors + enclosure) Time to set up: 3-4 hours Add a wind speed sensor, rain gauge, and UV sensor, and you have a complete weather station that logs local conditions at whatever interval you choose. The sensor ecosystem for the Pi is enormous. Each sensor connects to the Pi's I2C, SPI, or GPIO pins with a handful of wires and a few lines of setup code. For a weather station, the data pipeline typically flows from sensors through a Python script into InfluxDB (a time-series database) and Grafana (a dashboard). Both run on the Pi and together provide real-time charts, historical trends, and alerting when conditions cross thresholds. If you are running an OpenClaw agent alongside the weather station, the agent can interpret sensor data with natural language reasoning. " The LLM handles the logic, and you change behavior by editing a prompt instead of rewriting code.

Not every project needs the latest hardware. Here is a quick guide to matching your Pi model to your use case. The quad-core Cortex-A53 handles DNS and basic Python scripts. Not suitable for media playback, Docker, or AI workloads. Runs Home Assistant, OpenClaw, Kodi, RetroPie, and OpenMediaVault without issues. The 2. Good for desktop use, programming education, and setups where you want a clean all-in-one form factor. Every Pi model shares the same GPIO header, the same Raspberry Pi OS, and the same software ecosystem. Start with whatever Pi you have and upgrade when the workload demands it. For always-on projects like Pi-hole, VPN, NAS, Home Assistant, or OpenClaw, use an SSD instead of a microSD card. SD cards degrade under constant write operations and will eventually fail.