I've made a lot of posts about the Raspberry Pi in the past. I am a big fan of the device but if you haven't heard of it, check out my post linked above for an overview.
Use Plex? The Raspberry Pi is an excellent client for Plex as long as you do not need 4K it will perform as well as an Apple TV and other Plex client options. In fact, I found it to be better than all other options on the market until I needed 4K.
If you do not know what Plex is, Plex is a media center solution that hosts, organizes, and plays your Movies, TV Shows, Music, and PodCasts to any device in your home or pocket. Copy all your Bluray's to your Plex server and you can easily watch them while on the go on your iPhone, at home on your Raspberry Pi connected to your TV, or on your iPad while running on a treadmill.
RasPlex is a distribution that pre-configures everything you need to deploy the Plex client to a Raspberry Pi with very little effort. It also keeps it up to date and bundles it with extras to make for a better experience.
One of the projects I have been wanting to do for a long time is to build a magic mirror. This involves taking an old LCD TV/Monitor and stripping the bezel off and creating a new frame behind a piece of clear glass-like material. You then build or use existing Dashboard software to create an interactive dashboard you can look at for a daily overview.
Some magic mirror projects take it further and add voice control to add the ability to interact with it or even a mobile app to customize and control it. Some of the more popular open source Magic Mirror dashboard packages include facial recognition to recognize who is in front of hte mirror.
Check out this video if you want to see it in action and what it can do.
"The AIY Voice Kit from Google lets you build your own natural language processor and connect it to the Google Assistant. All of this fits in a handy little cardboard cube, powered by a Raspberry Pi."
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Source
This was a kit featured MagPi Magazine and actually included for free in one edition. While you do not need the kit it does make the project easier having all the parts supplied in one bundle.
This is a fantastic gift idea for inspiring students.
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As a 3D printer, Octoprint is one of my favorite uses of the Raspberry Pi. Most 3D printers require a user to put their 3D prints on to an SD card and insert into the printer and then mess with the tiny buttons and screen on the printer to kick off a printing job.
Octoprint acts as a wireless (or wired ethernet) print server with additional functionality. Octoprint can tell you how long a job will take, allow you to easily kill the job, estimate material costs, as well as provide overheat protection and other functionality.
If you ever get into 3D printing, you should setup Octoprint before even making your first print. I would lose my mind if I didn't have it.
I wrote about this project around a year ago.
The above is a portable console built around the Raspberry Pi Zero W ($10) that runs emulation software for around 8,000 games developed between the 1970s and 2000.
