Determining Pi with a Raspberry Pi

For Pi Day, we wanted to determine pi using a Raspberry Pi. We assembled a crack team of makers: Allan, a full-time multidisciplinary maker and marketer, Tanner, a fine woodworker and physicist turned programmer, and Shawn, who had a basement we could film in.

First we laid out a series of lines on paper 3" apart.

We threw a Pi onto the paper for an hour and marked one side with a marker.

We counted the number of times the mark crossed a line.

We plugged these numbers into Buffon's formula.

And we came up with a value of 3.07 for pi, pretty gosh darn close to the accepted value of 3.14!

The Pi suffered a broken capacitor and a couple of bent pins after about 100 tosses but otherwise behaved like a champ.