Build your Pi
Flash the SD card, set up the touchscreen, secure SSH, and check your power bank. By the end you’ll have a Pi that boots anywhere.
Start building →Build a Raspberry Pi IoT & AI lab.
Across seven phases you’ll turn a Raspberry Pi 4B into a portable teaching terminal — a touchscreen device that reads sensors, speaks the language of the internet (MQTT), stores data in a real database, and asks Claude to explain what the readings mean.
Choose a phase
Work through the phases in order. Each one builds on the last. Tick off the steps as you go — the website remembers where you got to so you can pick up next lesson.
Install the platform
Install Docker and bring up the five core services with a single command: Mosquitto, Node-RED, FastAPI, the AI service, and the Vue dashboard.
Start installing →Talk over MQTT
Send your first sensor reading from a laptop into the Pi. Watch it appear on the touchscreen in real time, complete with a stale badge when it stops.
Start streaming →Save your data
Add a real database. Sensor readings are saved every second so you can come back and look at the history — even after a reboot.
Start saving →Design the dashboard
Build a touchscreen interface with Vue and Tailwind. Big buttons, live charts, and a navigation a Year 7 could use.
Start designing →Ask Claude
Add an “Explain” button on each sensor card. Claude Haiku turns the raw numbers into a friendly explanation.
Start asking →Your first module
Connect a Micro:bit or ESP32. Build the Classroom Sensor Hub: live readings, trend charts, AI explanations, and snapshots — ready to demo to your class.
Plug in →Why we’re building this
IoT means the “Internet of Things” — everyday objects that send data to each other. Your phone, your smart speaker, the temperature sensor in a greenhouse. By the end of this course you’ll understand how that works because you’ll have built one yourself, from the SD card up. You’ll learn:
- How to set up a small computer (a Raspberry Pi) from scratch.
- How sensors talk to each other using a protocol called MQTT.
- How to store data in a database and view it on a screen.
- How to use an AI like Claude through an API to explain data.