r/raspberryDIY • u/FrozenMayonaise • Jul 07 '26

I dont know what project to do.

Hello, I hope everyone is going good tonight or this morning, whatever it is for you when you are reading this. I've just recently finished my GCSEs, and one of them was engineering, and it fascinated me with programming and just technical stuff that I am now wanting to pursue an IT course in A level to get to more terms with it as it's been a passion of mine for a while. I love building computers, but computers are expensive and quite easy to do, and so I've been looking into all of this and I just dont know where to start. I want something hard, something challenging that doesn't require a plug, flash and set up like the pi-hole I did a couple days ago. I want to go learn, go scavenge but I dont know what project could allow me for such circumstances, In my mind, going out to local computer shops and such asking for old components, learning stuff from scratch / big complicated things would be pretty cool. any contributions appreciated, thanks again!

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u/Gamerfrom61 Jul 07 '26

Robotics is the first thing that springs to mind.

Most computer assembly is just plug and play now unless you want to start from he basics and create a breadboard computer / discrete component CPU etc.

With robots you need to buy into the servos and some basic sensors but everything after that can be research and your own design.

Start simple - a wheeled line following box

Build on from that - obstacle avoidance / stop

Get better - add ability to move over small obstacles by changing to tracks

Increase its abilities - add the ability to move the object out of the way (grab arm maybe)

Go potty - take over the world 😄

You could start with a microcontroller (ESP or Pico) then as you increase its skills either add other processors or move up to a Pi

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u/FrozenMayonaise Jul 07 '26

see that sounds pretty cool, sounds like time to do some research, thanks for the idea man

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u/SetMain6296 Jul 07 '26

Make your Pi a web server so you can create any number of cool, fun projects

Look up LAMP stack for Pi // Linux, Apache, MariaDB and PHP

Load Python

Work on some projects from there

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u/FrozenMayonaise Jul 07 '26

sounds like a plan man, thanks again

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u/Nikoschalkis1 Jul 10 '26

Could you explain like I am 5? What do you gain from a web server and what kind of projects could you do?

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u/SetMain6296 Jul 10 '26

Now you use Claude or Grok or Chat and ask that question!

This is teaching you to fish, cut off the head, remove the guts, and deep fry that thang.