The Pi 500 Plus is here, and something we see a lot of people wondering is, what are the uses? What role can this fill in my life? That's why today we're going to be looking at five things you can do with a Raspberry Pi 500 Plus.

The original video idea was, you know, 500 things you can do with a Pi 5, but we figured, you know, with this coming out, it would be a little bit easier to do it the other way around. Welcome back to Core Electronics. Today we are diving into the Pi 500 Plus, the upmarket version of the Pi 500 that comes with some extra goodies like a mechanical keyboard and an SSD.

The Pi 500 series offers a bit of a unique idea in the modern computing space. What if you had a maker-friendly computer built into a keyboard? To start using it, all you would need to do is plug in your USB-C power, monitor, and mouse, and you have a full computer experience. Then you could unplug that and plug it into your TV and have your computer there, or you could move it to your workshop station or throw it in your bag and take it wherever you want to go.

Because of this, the Pi 500 Plus is pretty portable and power efficient. It runs at about 2 watts on idle, but it's still plenty powerful enough for most day-to-day tasks. You can happily browse the net, do some light coding, run your word processors, whatever people with real jobs actually do. You get the point.

However, because it's based on a Pi, which has a large ecosystem with a lot of community projects, you can add a lot of functionality to this thing. You can sort of turn it into a Swiss Army Knife computer thing that you can take anywhere you want. And so that's what we're going to be looking at.

By the way, we are going to keep things nice and light in this video. If you want instructions or resources to get started with any of these, head on over to the written guide linked below. And so, thing you can add number one, an entire portable media library. Using the official Raspberry Pi imager, you can flash something like LibreELEC onto a microSD card. It's an operating system dedicated entirely to playing media.

Once you've installed it, if you plug in your microSD card, it will now automatically boot into LibreELEC instead of your usual desktop experience, which is installed on your SSD. This is a mega convenient thing about the 500 Plus. You can just carry around completely different setups on microSDs, whack it in, swap them out as you need, and just fire up whatever you want, really.

In LibreELEC, which runs Kodi, the fantastic open source media player, you can copy files over your local network to your library on your Pi and then take them wherever you want. So, next time you're traveling and you have no internet and you just got to scratch that Core Electronics video tutorial itch, you are covered. You can prepare for those situations.

There's also a whole heap of customization and add-ons you can install, like you can connect your YouTube, Netflix, or whatever to it. And, 500 gigabytes or even a terabyte microSD cards are coming down in price. It doesn't need to be a super fast card. And so you can load up a lot of content and videos and TV shows or whatever you want on these things and haul around your library.

Thing you can do number two, install Steam Link. Steam Link is an official program from Valve. It's super easy to install. It's just a line or two of code in your terminal. It's designed for the Pi 5 and it lets you stream games from your gaming PC to your Pi over your local network. Think of it as kind of setting this up as sort of a wireless monitor.

This is actually something I use a lot at home. We have a projector out the back in our barbecue area. I bring out the Pi 5, plug it in, and just through Wi-Fi, you can get some decent low latency streaming. Probably not good enough for competitive shooters, but couch games or things like Jackbox, absolutely perfect. And if you can connect it via Ethernet, it is pretty solid, like maybe able to play Counter-Strike.

You can play with your Pi 500 keyboard or connect controllers or whatever. It's a super handy tool. It's really streamlined and it's just really nice to have something to rock up and stream your Steam library from one PC to another screen locally.

On a similar note, number three, installing a retro gaming operating system. Using the Raspberry Pi imager again, you can install something like Recalbox or Batocera or RetroPie onto a micro SD card. Then when you want to, you just whack it in and then you boot up into this nice system where you can play any retro game from a wide variety of consoles.

Like LibreELEC, you can transfer files from another computer locally, which is super handy for copying over your ROMs and whatnot. Controller support is great. Everything just runs so smoothly in these things now, and you can expect to play anything up to a PS1 or Dreamcast on the Pi 500+. Plus, there's a whole heap of cool stuff like third-party achievements, online play, upscaling. It's just a great little extra fun thing to have and just be able to whip it out any time.

Thing you can do number four, learn to code. We had to bring up this cop-out one at any time. This is probably the best thing to do on a Pi in general. Because of how popular Pis are, you will find countless guides on the net covering pretty much anything. Want to get started with some computer vision? There are plenty of object detection, face recognition, pose estimation guides. Just plug in a USB webcam and off and away with a Python script.

That 40-pin GPIO connector on the back lets you plug hardware into this thing, meaning you can plug in sensors, motors, lights, and whatever you want them to get started experimenting. Pis in general are just a fantastic way to kind of learn that bridge between virtual code and real-world hardware. And there are some pretty wild and wacky projects out there like tracking planes, tracking lightning strikes, or reading fingerprints. It is such an incredible community.

And you could learn this on a lot of platforms, but again, Pis and by extension the Pi 500 Plus have just a crazy amount of content online already, available and catered to them. Number five, set up your Pi to run cloud-based LLMs. You can get cloud-based LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini to be directly integrated into your Pi's inbuilt terminal. You can then give it access to a certain project folder on your Pi, and then it can read, create, and modify, and do whatever you tell it to in there to help you out.

It's super easy to do, and it only takes a few minutes to set up. And once you've got it all done, you can just ask it, like create a game of Snake or something like that. This is not just for making simple games like Snake though, it's a great tool for debugging, and it just helps you develop projects overall. It's 2025, there's no need to be programming like a 2022 pre-LLM ape.

And that was five things you can do with a Pi 500 Plus. Again, if you are interested in any of these, you can find some better instructions in the written guide to get you started. This list was also obviously far from comprehensive. Thinking outside the box here, there is so much more you could do. You could set up a Minecraft server on an SD card and have a temporary portable server to take with you.

You could have SD cards with alternative Linux distros like Kali or Twister OS for different working environments. You could have an SD card set up to launch into kiosk mode for a portable display project. Your use cases and creativity are what bounds the usefulness of this to you. Well, that about wraps us up here. Hopefully you have some ideas floating around in your noggin there for some potential use cases for your Pi 500.

And if you have any more, comment them down below or head on over to our community forums and post about it. Until next time though, happy making.