Table of contents
20 beginner-friendly Raspberry Pi projects post is the better place to begin.10 Raspberry Pi 5 projects worth building in 2026
Table of contents
10 Raspberry Pi 5 projects worth building in 2026
The Raspberry Pi 5 is fast enough that the interesting question has changed. It used to be "can the Pi handle this?" Now it's more like "what would I actually build with a small computer that boots off an SSD, drives two 4K screens and runs object detection without breaking a sweat?"
So this list skips the projects that ran fine on a Pi 4 and focuses on the ones that got good because of what the 5 added: a PCIe lane, the RP1 I/O chip, two camera connectors and enough CPU to stop being the bottleneck. If you're after simpler starting points, our 20 beginner-friendly Raspberry Pi projects post is the better place to begin.
10 Raspberry Pi 5 projects worth building in 2026
1. Move your whole home server onto an NVMe SSD
This is the first thing to do with a Pi 5, and it changes how the board feels more than any other single upgrade. The PCIe 2.0 x1 connector on the side takes an M.2 HAT, and once your root filesystem lives on an SSD instead of a microSD card, boot times drop, Docker stops crawling, and the SD card wear that kills long-running Pi projects goes away entirely.
From there it's a normal little server: Docker, Portainer, Pi-hole, Immich for photos, whatever you keep meaning to self-host. The 8GB board is the sweet spot here, because containers eat RAM long before they eat CPU.
2. Build a Home Assistant hub that survives a power cut
Home Assistant on a Pi 5 is a different experience from a Pi 3 or 4. Automations fire without that half-second lag, the dashboard loads instantly, and add-ons like ESPHome or Frigate stop competing for scraps.
Two Pi 5 details matter here. The real-time clock keeps the time across a power cut with a small battery on the RTC header, so the Pi comes back knowing what time it is instead of waiting on the network. And with two independent USB 3.0 ports, your Zigbee stick and your Z-Wave stick can both work properly at the same time.
3. Run a real NVR with the AI HAT+
Software motion detection triggers on every shadow and passing headlight. Proper object detection tells you a person walked up your driveway, and ignores the cat.
The AI HAT+ puts a Hailo accelerator on the PCIe lane, in 13 or 26 TOPS versions, and it takes the inference load completely off the CPU. Point Frigate at a few camera streams and the Pi handles them in real time while staying cool enough to keep doing everything else. It's built for vision work, so treat it as a detection engine rather than a general AI chip. Raspberry Pi's own AI HAT+ documentation lists which models are supported out of the box.
4. Put a camera in the garden that thinks for itself
The AI Camera is a different approach to the same problem. The Sony IMX500 sensor runs the neural network on the sensor itself, so the Pi receives results rather than a video stream it has to chew through.
That's ideal for anything battery-powered or left outside: a bird feeder camera that only saves frames with a bird in them, a driveway counter, a beehive monitor. The Pi spends most of its time idle, which is the whole point.
5. Drive two 4K screens from one board
Both micro HDMI ports on the Pi 5 do 4Kp60, at the same time, with a GPU that can actually keep up. That makes a genuinely useful signage or info-wall build: one screen with your Home Assistant dashboard, another with a build pipeline, transport times, or shop orders.
It's an unglamorous project that people keep running for years. The 4GB board is plenty, since you're rendering web pages rather than crunching data.
6. Run a language model locally, with realistic expectations
The 16GB Pi 5 will run small models through Ollama entirely offline, and it's a good way to understand what these things actually cost to run. A 3B model answers at conversational-ish speed. A 7B model works but you'll be watching the words appear.
Worth being straight about this one: it's a learning project and a privacy project, not a replacement for anything you use daily. Load models from an SSD rather than a microSD card, or you'll spend a minute waiting every time one loads.
7. Build a retro console that plays the harder systems
Every Pi generation gets used for emulation, but the 5 is the first that comfortably handles the awkward middle era. Dreamcast and PSP run well. Saturn and N64 are much better than they were. GameCube is possible in places and frustrating in others.
Give it active cooling before you start. Emulation keeps the CPU busy for hours, and a throttling Pi produces stutter that looks like an emulator problem when it isn't.
8. Take over your 3D printer with Klipper
Klipper moves motion planning off the printer's own board and onto a Linux machine, and the printer gets faster and quieter for it. A Pi 5 runs the host, the web interface and a camera stream at once without the input shaping calculations fighting the video encoder for CPU time.
Add a camera and you get time-lapses and remote spaghetti detection, which is the real reason anyone sets this up.
9. Log real sensor data with Qwiic and Grafana
The Pi's 40-pin header is powerful and slightly miserable to wire by hand. The Qwiic adapter sits on the header and gives you three connectors, after which every sensor is one cable and no jumper wire soup.
Chain a BME280 for temperature, humidity and pressure, add an INA219 to watch power draw, then push readings into InfluxDB and graph them in Grafana. It's the most useful boring project on this list, and it teaches you more about your house than you'd expect. We wrote about the wiring side in using Qwiic devices with Raspberry Pi.
10. Build a robot with two cameras
The Pi 5 has two 4-lane MIPI connectors, and the Pi 4 had one. That sounds like a small thing until you want depth from stereo vision, or a rover with one camera looking ahead and another watching the arm.
Pair it with the breadboard breakout while you're prototyping, so motor drivers and encoders are easy to move around before anything gets soldered down.
What the Pi 5 actually changed
A PCIe lane
The FPC connector exposes PCIe 2.0 x1, which is what NVMe HATs and the AI HAT+ plug into. You can select Gen 3 speeds in config, roughly doubling throughput, though Raspberry Pi doesn't certify it and some HATs are happier than others.
RP1, the I/O chip
Raspberry Pi designed its own southbridge for the 5, and it's why both USB 3.0 ports now run at full 5Gbps simultaneously instead of sharing a lane. If you have ever had an external drive and a capture device sabotage each other on a Pi 4, that's the fix.
Power and heat are now real considerations
The Pi 5 wants a 5V/5A USB-C supply with PD to give full current to peripherals. It runs on a 5V/3A supply, but it limits USB power, and undervoltage warnings during a long build are miserable to debug. It also needs active cooling for any sustained load. Neither of these was true of earlier boards, and both catch people out.
One thing that went away: there's no analog audio jack anymore. Audio goes out over HDMI or USB.
Which Raspberry Pi 5 should you buy?
| Model | Price | Where it makes sense |
|---|---|---|
| Pi 5, 4GB | €108.95 | Signage, kiosks, Klipper, robotics, anything with one job |
| Pi 5, 8GB | €144.95 | Home Assistant, Docker, NVR work, emulation. The default choice |
| Pi 5, 16GB | €178.95 | Local language models, heavy container stacks, many things at once |
If you're stuck between two, buy the RAM rather than the accessories. You can add an SSD or an accelerator later, but the memory is soldered on.
Before you order
Budget for a 5V/5A USB-C power supply, active cooling, and either a decent A2 microSD card or an NVMe HAT and SSD. None of it is expensive, and skipping any of the three is the most common reason a Pi 5 build feels disappointing.
FAQ
Is the Raspberry Pi 5 worth it over a Pi 4?
For anything involving storage speed, cameras, containers or AI, yes. For a simple sensor logger or a Pi-hole, a Pi 4 or even a Zero is the more sensible buy, and it'll cost you less to run.
Can the Raspberry Pi 5 boot from an SSD?
Yes. With an M.2 HAT on the PCIe connector you can boot straight from NVMe, and it's the single biggest quality-of-life change available to the board.
Do I really need a 5V/5A power supply?
For anything with drives, HATs or busy USB ports, yes. A 5V/3A supply boots the board but restricts USB current, and the symptoms of undervoltage look like random software faults.
Does the Raspberry Pi 5 need a fan?
For sustained workloads, yes. It throttles under load without cooling, and that shows up as stutter or slow builds rather than an obvious error.
What can the AI HAT+ actually do?
It accelerates vision models: object detection, pose estimation, segmentation, several camera streams at once. It's a vision accelerator, so language models still run on the CPU.
Can a Raspberry Pi 5 run a local LLM?
Small ones, yes, especially on the 16GB board with Ollama. Expect a few words per second on 7B models. It works and it's private, but it isn't fast.
How many cameras can the Pi 5 take?
Two, through the pair of 4-lane MIPI connectors, and either one can be used for a display instead.
Is Raspberry Pi 5 good for beginners?
It's a fine first board, though it's more computer than most first projects need. If you're starting out and want ideas scaled to that, start with our beginner Raspberry Pi projects guide.
