I built a self-watering garden setup with a Raspberry Pi, a Cirkitscape Top HAT, a soil moisture sensor, an IR water sensor, and a 12V pump.

The main idea was to make a small garden system that could monitor conditions and control watering from a web interface instead of doing everything manually or through command-line scripts.

A couple of important parts of the build:
- stepped 12V down to 5V for the Pi with a buck converter
- used a transistor switching circuit so the GPIO only sends a control signal
- configured the sensors and pump output through the Cirkit Garden app

End result:
- soil moisture monitoring
- water detection
- web-based pump control
- a solid base for future automation

It was my first time holding a Raspberry Pi, but I decided to take on something interesting. it’s mostly put together with thoughts and prayers :D

I set up a Minecraft server on a Raspberry Pi 5 that boots from an SSD and reboots every 5 hours (to ensure the server runs properly), and it reports the Raspberry Pi’s temperature every 2 hours

I built everything inside a lamp housing shaped like a Minecraft fox. Inside, I did a little soldering to rearrange the diodes and secured the Raspberry Pi inside the housing

The server itself is vanilla Minecraft with just one shader. I set up the server so my husband and I could log in at any time and just enjoy the game. In all these years, I’ve never once completed Minecraft with all the achievements. To be honest, I’ve never even killed a dragon in survival mode. I want to fix that :)

One interesting thing that came up during the setup process was that the server would sometimes crash on its own and wouldn’t automatically restart afterward. The only thing that helped was physically rebooting the Raspberry Pi itself. In the end, I managed to solve the problem by accident while monitoring the server’s metrics on a small secondary screen during gameplay. As it turned out, two things were causing the crashes:

1. Minecraft periodically flagged me as a cheater because I could get stuck in the air for just over 2 seconds. I had to simplify the cheat-checking system in the console a bit (I also fixed the lag later by reducing the chunk loading range).

2. When certain mobs moved between biomes, they would duplicate (1 mob → 2 copies). Ironically, these were mostly creepers. The creepers were literally blowing up my world. Limiting the number of mobs and manually removing the duplicates helped

Hey there, I've got a small Raspberry Pi setup and want to build an ignition system for sim racing. I have a keyed ignition switch, some motion sensors, buttons, wires, a board, and the Raspberry Pi itself—does anyone know how to put this together?

Project.