The Pi 500+ is here, and we see a lot of people wondering what the Pi hundred series is, what its uses are, and what role it can fill. That’s why today we are looking at 5 things you can do with a Raspberry Pi 500+.
This guide will cover the premium version of the Pi 500, the Pi 500+. But all of these examples should work fine on the original Pi 500 and Pi 400, maybe with reduced performance.
To get started, all you'll need is a way to power the Pi-in-keyboard, a monitor to see what you're doing, and a mouse to move the mouse - and now you have a full desktop computer experience. The video cable could be plugged into a TV, workshop monitor, or really any screen that has an HDMI input.
It's pretty power efficient, at only about 2 watts while idling, it doesn't consume too much power, so it could be battery powered. But it's still powerful enough that you can browse the net, do some light coding, run a word processor, and perform any other tasks you could run on a Model B Pi 5.
1. Portable Media Library
One of the most convenient things about the Pi 500+, is its ability to boot off a completely different system on the fly. You can install a certain OS onto a MicroSD card, insert it into the Pi, and by default, it will boot into this new system. You could very feasibly have a Swiss Army knife of installations to swap and boot into as you please. One that's handy to have is an installation of LibreElec, a media streaming system that allows you to play your favourite movies and shows (that you have downloaded).
LibreElec is a part of a suite of installations that are incredibly easy to get going with, thanks to the Raspberry Pi imager.
Start by downloading and installing the Raspberry Pi Imager. Then open it and:
- Insert your microSD card into your computer. Any data stored on this device will be wiped in the process. Also, ensure it is appropriately sized to hold your library (huge microSD cards are becoming quite affordable).
- In "Raspberry Pi Device", Select: "Raspberry Pi 5", in "Operating System", scroll down a bit, select "Media Player OS", then "LibreElec" and select the Pi 5 version. Then choose the card you inserted, and let it flash!
- Once you that process has finished, insert your card and start using LibreElec and the Kodi media player it comes with!
We have an older guide on using LibreElec if you want a hand setting up the file structure, or adding any extras like YouTube or Netflix integration.
2. Steam Link
Steam Link is an official piece of software developed by Valve for the Pi 5 series. It takes only a line or two to install, and allows you to stream your gaming from your gaming PC to the Pi 500+ over your local network. This means you could plug your Pi 500+ into your TV, or projector anywhere in your house, and have it act as a sort of wireless monitor that you can connect controllers to.
The latency is quite respectable - even over Wi-Fi, it is good enough for casual couch gaming. If you can connect it via Ethernet, it is even better - maybe enough to play some more casual shooters. This is actually something that I use quite a lot at home to stream party games to the back shed (which thankfully has great Wi-Fi coverage).
We have an entire guide dedicated to getting this going on the Pi 5 that should work without hassle on the Pi 500. In this guide, we set it up to automatically boot on launch. However, this can be ignored, and you can keep it on your SSD to instead manually boot up when needed.
3. Retro Gaming Console
Another operating system easy to install through the Raspberry Pi Imager is Recalbox - a system that holds a collection of emulators allowing you to play retro games. There are a few options available that you also might want to check out, including Retropie and Batocera, but we found Recalbox to be the easiest to get going and to have the best out-of-the-box experience. Once you have installed it, you can copy over the ROMs of your favourite games and start playing with your Keyboard, or connected controllers. It has a whole bunch of cool features like 3rd party achievements (yes even if the game never had them originally), online couch play, and upscaling to play the game in a higher quality than it might of originally been.
We have an entire guide on setting up Recalbox on a MicroSD card (coming soon!), but if you wish to get going now, you can use the following steps to get it installed:
- Insert your microSD card into your computer. Any data stored on this device will be wiped in the process. Also, ensure it is appropriately sized to hold your library (huge microSD cards are becoming quite affordable).
- In "Raspberry Pi Device", Select: "Raspberry Pi 5", in "Operating System", scroll down a bit, select "Gaming and Emulation", then "Recalbox" and select the Pi 5 version.
- Then choose the card you inserted, and let it flash! Once you that process has finished, insert your card and start using LibreElec and the Kodi media player it comes with!
4. Learn to program!
This is probably the best thing you can do with a Raspberry Pi in general. Because of how popular they are, you’ll find countless guides online covering just about everything.
Want to get started with some computer vision? There are plenty of tutorials on object detection, face recognition, and even pose estimation—just plug in a USB webcam and get going!
The 40-pin GPIO also lets you connect hardware directly, meaning you can add sensors, motors, lights—whatever you like—and start experimenting. Raspberry Pis are a fantastic way to bridge the gap between virtual code and real-world hardware.
There are also plenty of wild projects with unusual hardware setups. People have used Pis to track airplanes, monitor lightning strikes, and even read fingerprints. Sure, you could learn coding and hardware integration on other platforms, but Raspberry Pis (and by extension, the Pi 500 and beyond) have an enormous amount of community-driven content tailored specifically for them.
5. Run an LLM
The Pi 5 series is definitely powerful enough for programming, and in 2025 - LLM's are the norm.
Why not setup a cloud based coding assistant like Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini? And their coding solutions can be invoked right from the terminal!
These assistants usually require a subscription, unfortunately they are not free.
In this example, we'll install Anthropic's, Claude Code, but a similar process can be used to install OpenAI's Codex, or Google's Gemini Code Assist.
Install is super easy, an internet connection is required to install.
- Open the terminal (any directory)
- Expand the window, so it covers the full width of the screen
- Ensure your Pi is up to date with
sudo apt updateandsudo apt full-upgrade - Use the one-line install from the quickstart guide:
curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash - A warning might appear requesting you to add the install to the path, copy and paste the command into the terminal
- Its installed!
To use Claude, create a folder where you want to start work, or if you have an existing project, open that folder.
- In the File Explorer window, click Tools > Open Terminal in Folder
- Type `claude`
- On first use it will ask you to sign-in, follow the steps shown in the terminal.
- After you've signed in, start using the LLM like normal!
Note that this kind of coding assistant can read, create and modify files from the folder you started it in, but that will use extra tokens!
A prompt we like when developing projects on the PI is (and feel free to use and share any changes you make):
You are developing an application to run on the Raspberry Pi 4/5/PI500+.
As such please make use of libraries that are confirmed working for the hardware, and are open-source.
I might provide a link to hardware that could interface with the GPIO or IO on the Pi, please use official libraries where possible.
Please include critical debugging print statements, and any visualisations can be done in PyGame
Do not use emojis in any output
Below is our project. Before beginning, make sure you relay that plan to me.
It definitely does not stop at 5...
And that’s five things you can do with a Pi 500 Plus. Of course, this list is far from comprehensive—when you think outside the box, the possibilities open up even more.
For example, you could set up a Minecraft server on an SD card to create a portable, temporary server. You might keep additional SD cards loaded with alternative Linux distributions like Kali or Twister OS for different work environments. You could even configure a card to launch directly into kiosk mode for use in a portable display project. Ultimately, your creativity and unique use cases are what define the true versatility of the Pi 500 Plus.
Well, that just about wraps things up. Hopefully, you’ve come away with a few ideas for how you might use your Pi 500. And if you have more suggestions, feel free to share them in our community forums linked below. Until next time—happy making!
