Win a Raspberry Pi 4 in Celebration of Our 10th Birthday!

With the new Pi 4 and its fun upgraded capabilities, I'd build a portable handhelds retroconsole, allowing to play old videogames running on GameBoy, NES, SuperNES, Nintendo 64, Megadrive, MasterSystem, MAME, Amiga, PlayStation, and so on...

It should be with 5" display, d-pad, 8 digital buttons (4 of which are backbones), 2 analog joysticks, 3 general purpose buttons, 2 stereo speakers, digital volume control, 3.5mm Headphone Jack, battery LED status, internal fan triggered by temperature, 2 USB ports, 1 Ethernet Port, WiFi, Bluetooth, and HDMI out in order to connect the console to the TV.

Obviously I'll create the design for the case and all plastic stuff, and after I'll print using my 3D printer.

The specification of raspberry pi in version fourth looks very impressive. I hope that in the next version appears a socket for m.2, it will be perfect to create a nas or streaming device. But USB3.0 socket it is also fine option to connect external hard drive to achieve reasonable read/write speeds.

My idea is try to use of RPi4 as streaming device with usage of adaptive bitrate streaming technologies. As source I would like to use a USB dongle with DVB-T which be source of one MUX. The chosen channels will be transcoded e.g. by ffmpeg software. The final data will be segmented and distributed with one of technologies e.g. HLS over HTTP. Below there is diagram for this idea:

I would make a boat that can help pick up rubbish from pools,lakes and rivers. It would have GPS navigation, 15000kv props so that it would go pretty fast. It would have an endless supply of power via a solar panel. You would never need to use a rote control because it would have sensors and a home putton on my phone. Raspberry pi would communicate with both the phone and the boat. I think it would help the environment. I'm always thinking of ways to help.

Before getting into what I would like to do with a Pi lets highlight what's the Pi good at, compared to PCs and MCUs. The Pi in some way is inbetween a PC and an MCU when it comes to power consumption, processing power and memory. Its IOs are more flexible than the ones from a PC (as is) but still doesn't come with DACs or ADCs like many MCUs. Just like a PC it also is not as good for realtime as an MCU.

As it consumes very little power I would take advantage of that and leave it always on to continuously acquire data and also run some servers. Here are some ideas I would at some moment like to try:

SDR:

SDRs are fun, I got a couple of SDRs that so far I've used them with antennas within the apartment, which of course is not that interesting. An SBC on a weatherproof box could be installed very close to an outdoor antenna which could continuously capture interesting stuff, like GOES weather sats.

Long term data recording:

There are a couple of experiments I would like to do that may take a few days of recording and would be too computationally expensive for an MCU. An SBC would have the right amount of power and memory to perform such experiments. I could use an SBC to perform multi-day bench DMM measurements, outdoor acoustic noise measurements or plant growth timelapses.

I'd love to replace my Pi 0 and manage my two 3d printers with Octoprint with touch screen controls

I would like to Mayb build a music sampler I know there’s samplers around but would like to try create my own

As this is the first Raspberry Pi with full speed gigabit ethernet and usb 3 I'd have to build a NAS with personal cloud on our home network.  Sharing a usb 3 ssd drive with gigabit ethernet would make it possible for the Raspberry Pi 4 to serve as an apple time capsule for the cost of the drive +$35. This is insane!

Server could run a VPN to allow connection from out of home, and iSCSI to a bitscope blade of 4 and a cluster Pi hat.

And personally I'm excited to see it run a desktop on 2 screens.

Ive always wanted to experiment with the Raspberry Pi but couldn't come up with money to do so, not knowing about capabilities of the Raspberry Pi I have no idea what I would/could build with it.

Winning one of these would be a new experience for me

I would use the new capabilities of the Raspberry PI 4 to run a home automation server and PI Hole ad blocker.

I’ve not undertaken any PI development before but was thinking about trying one out to extend my interfacing and integration skills by building an extensible controller for the projects I am, and am intending to build.  I would expect features to grow over time but my first two would be:

- a set of training signals for a new Oscilloscope to learn and investigate new features on that.

- a data acquisition device, over wi-fi, for the power supply I’m building - an idea evolving from something Shabaz mentioned in a comment recently

- a programmable controller for V2 of my power supply so I can drive output patterns for test purposes, remotely control it etc.  For example, and building on the first bullet above, maybe programming the power supply to drive a resistor/capacitor circuit so that the charge time can be measured with the Scope and then to ramp down the voltage so the discharge time can be measured.  Which could also extend the data acquisition feature by interfacing with the Scope.

As I build more projects, it could extend - e.g. by programming test voltages/currents for a DC load.